A viral TikTok video posted last week showed an Airbnb listing in Greenville, Mississippi for a "1830s slave cabin" and caused the rental site to remove the listing and apologize, according to multiple reports.
Wynton Yates, an entertainment and civil rights attorney in New Orleans, posted the video about the Panther Burn Cottage located on the Belmont Plantation and explained why "this is not ok in the least bit." The video currently as over 2.7 million views, 450,000 likes, nearly 17,000 comments, and almost 25,000 shares.
"This is not ok in the least bit," Yates said in the video. "And I know there's somebody who says, 'Oh you're looking for controversy where it doesn't exist.' No, this is an 1830s slave cabin that is up on Airbnb as a bed and breakfast."
Yates went on to point out that the listing clearly says it is an "1830s slave cabin" right in the description, and then questioned how someone thinks there's nothing wrong with renting it out as a bed and breakfast.
"How is this ok in somebody's mind to, to rent this out, a place where human beings were kept as slaves, rent this out as a bed and breakfast?" Yates said.
Airbnb issued an apology and said they are sorry for not acting sooner to remove the listing.
"Properties that formerly housed the enslaved have no place on Airbnb. We apologize for any trauma or grief created by the presence of this listing, and others like it, and that we did not act sooner to address this issue," Airbnb said in a statement provided to CNN.
The owner of the house, 52-year-old Ben Hauser, told The Washington Post that he took over ownership of it last month and that it was "the previous owner’s decision to market the building as the place where slaves once slept," despite the building having been a doctor's office.
"As the new, three-week owner of The Belmont in Greenville, Mississippi, I apologize for the decision to provide our guests a stay at 'the slave quarters' behind the 1857 antebellum home that is now a bed and breakfast," Hauser told CNN in a statement. "I also apologize for insulting African Americans whose ancestors were slaves."
"I am not interested in making money off slavery," Hauser told The Washington Post.
"I intend to do all I can to right a terrible wrong and, hopefully, regain advertising on Airbnb so The Belmont can contribute to the most urgent demand for truth telling about the history of the not only the South but the entire nation," Hauser added in his statement to The Washington Post.
The listing is no longer up on Airbnb, but screenshots of it show that the property the cabin is on features a 9,000-square-foot mansion built in 1847 with nine bedrooms and eight bathrooms. All of the rooms had been available for rent, including the cabin.
"This particular structure, the Panther Burn Cabin, is an 1830s slave cabin from the extant Panther Burn Plantation to the south of Belmont," the listing said. "It has also been used as a tenant sharecroppers cabin and a medical office for local farmers and their families to visit the plantation doctor. It was moved to Belmont in 2017 and meticulously restored over the course of a year."
Towards the end of the viral TikTok, Yates showed some of the reviews of the cabin listing. One person wrote, "Memorable. Highly recommend watching the sunset!" Another said, "We stayed in the cabin and it was historic but elegant."
"A slave cabin is elegant?" Yates said with disgust.
"The history of slavery in this country is constantly denied, and now it's being mocked by being turned into a luxurious vacation spot," Yates added in the video.
He showed how the cabin had running water and plenty of other amenities that would not have been there when enslaved people were living in it. Yates provided a statement to The Washington Post and further explained how "slave cabins" were in no ways comfortable.
"It was built by enslaved people and lived in by enslaved people where they died from being overworked, infectious diseases, hunger and heartbreak. They died in those spaces," Yates said. "It wasn’t a comfortable situation."
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