Airbnb Apologizes For Mississippi ‘Slave Cabin’ Listing After TikTok Video Goes Viral
Airbnb apologized after coming under fire over a viral TikTok video that showed a company listing for an “1830s slave cabin” where enslaved people who were forced to toil on a Mississippi plantation were housed.
"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 Monday (Aug. 1) in a statement provided to CNN.
The controversial property is the Panther Burn Cottage at the Belmont Plantation in Greenville.
NBC News reported that Wynton Yates, an African American lawyer from New Orleans, posted about the listing on Friday (July 29). “How is this okay in somebody’s mind to rent this out? A place where human beings were kept as slaves, rent this out as a bed and breakfast?” he said.
The current property owner, Brad Hauser, told CNN that the listing was a leftover from the previous owner, and he was told that the cottage was not a slave quarters.
"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. I also apologize for insulting African Americans whose ancestors were slaves," he said, adding that he doesn’t plan to rent the cabin in the future.
Airbnb said the company is working with experts to create new policies to address other properties connected to slavery.
In an interview with CNN, Yates argued that renting the renovated cabin is "an egregious leveling up of this atrocity of just disrespecting and making a mockery of what is the slave experience because we're in a country where we're still experiencing the repercussions of slavery."
