Charleston, South Carolina, a place with a complex, sorrowful, deep, and long history,  has concrete evidence in its museums and on markers displaying more inclusive and factual historical stories than I expected. A former port of human trafficking from which I learned the vast majority of today’s African Americans, should records be found, could trace at least one of their ancestors.

Reflecting more inclusive truth about slavery and the role it played creating American wealth, I digested the somber truth. What might the accumulated wealth be had it not been gathered on the labor of slaves and built on the land taken from Native Americans? Might the array and amount of lavish antiques have been far fewer had these Euro-Americans, men and women, been in the fields? Paid their laborers? Released people after the indentured service time ran out? What would our country be like had the Reconstruction Period not been upended by fear and the Jim Crow era?

Education. It comes back to education conquering ignorance and fear. Let all our children, and those who deny facts, go to museums, read, talk to others, especially their elders. Thank you to those who took the first steps to alter the public stories by encompassing a greater truth. Thank you to those who continue teaching, displaying accurate historical markers, and letting travelers learn from the past.