While much attention has been paid this summer to the removal of racist monuments to the confederacy, America's legacy of historic plantations continues on as a lucrative, popular, and deeply controversial industry. 

A transformation has been taking place within some of the organizations and entities that own and operate these sites, however, writes Tiya Miles, professor of history at Harvard University, in The Boston Globe.

Miles explores the conflicting messages sent by the operators of some of these estates in recent months as support for the Movement for Black Lives has increased even among the operators of former plantations. 

Miles also highlights Whitney Plantation in Louisiana and the McLeod Plantation in South Carolina has a new type of historic plantation that "consciously centers African and African American experiences" as part of an effort to produce new "models for how the plantation museum experience has been reimagined." Despite this progress, Miles writes, these approaches have "remained in the minority of Southern estate museums."

The shifts come as the historic and cultural significance of residences occupied by enslaved people and other, more contemporary forms of Black and African American built legacies are reassessed by a rising cohort of historians and activists.