When I first visited the Town of Livingston, I was struck by how vibrant it had become. Though privately developed and not an incorporated municipality, Livingston now features restaurants, festivals, and a farmers’ market that draw visitors from across the region. Yet beneath today’s charm lies a deeper story—one that reveals how the Metro Jackson area remembers, or fails to remember, its past.
My interest in Livingston began while studying the Battle of Jackson. The Livingston-Jackson corridor once served as a key supply and troop movement route during the Civil War. Along the way, I came across a powerful story passed down in the community: an account of a slave rebellion in Livingston. Oral tradition holds that more oppressors died in the revolt than the enslaved themselves. But written accounts and newspapers insisted no slave owners were killed.
This tension between oral tradition and written record is what makes Livingston significant. Oral histories preserve resilience and pride across generations, while official records often minimize or erase such stories. Both versions matter. At Livingston Missionary Baptist Church, many members trace their roots to that era, carrying forward a heritage rarely acknowledged in textbooks.
Livingston also carries another legacy: it was once the county seat of Madison County. In its prime, the town bustled with commerce and governance. But when the railroad bypassed it, the county seat moved to Canton, and Livingston declined into obscurity. Ironically, that decline has fueled its modern revival—not just as a quaint development but as a place with layered histories worth remembering.
Some of those histories are harder to confront. At the end of State Street, near the Pearl River, once stood a barracoon—a holding pen where enslaved men, women and children were confined before being sold. The structure is gone, and no marker acknowledges what happened there.
This absence is striking when compared to other cities. Charleston, South Carolina, has built a multibillion-dollar tourism industry on its antebellum image, though often criticized for downplaying the suffering that produced such grandeur. Vicksburg markets its Civil War legacy through battlefield parks and reenactments. Natchez attracts visitors to the Forks of the Road, once one of the largest slave markets in America, alongside its antebellum homes. In these cities, memory has been packaged for public consumption—but at least it has been acknowledged.
By contrast, cities like Livingston, Jackson, and Holly Springs have not done nearly as much. Holly Springs, with its grand mansions and annual “Pilgrimage” tours, long emphasized Confederate memory and architecture overlook the enslaved people who made such wealth possible. Only recently have some tours begun to include that fuller story. Jackson, too, once filled with antebellum homes, and the Bowman House Hotel, used by Union troops as headquarters during the occupation, has lost most of those structures. The result is an incomplete connection to the city’s role in the slave economy.
Until I studied it, I did not fully grasp how deeply slavery shaped Jackson. I was surprised to learn about the scale of the trade, the role of the United States Colored Troops, and the ways oppression defined the capital. Even today, people are often taken aback when these topics arise. That may be because, while they were sometimes mentioned, they were not emphasized, leaving generations without a complete understanding.
Should cities like Livingston, Jackson, and Holly Springs follow Charleston, Vicksburg, or Natchez by turning history into tourism? On one hand, doing so risks reducing trauma to entertainment. On the other hand, silence leaves room for distortion and forgetting. Oral traditions point one way; the written record another. The truth lies in between, in a fuller reckoning that neither erases nor commodifies the past.
History is never just about the past. It is about what we choose to emphasize, how we remember, and whose voices we honor. In Metro Jackson, that choice remains unfinished.
“Ignorance is bliss,” the saying goes. But when it comes to slavery, ignorance is not bliss. It is a loss for history, for justice, and for truth itself.
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