Justice
A Design Dilemma: How to Visualize the Trauma of Slavery
Landscape designer Walter Hood talks about his vision for the International African American Museum, which is scheduled to open in Charleston, South Carolina next year.
When visiting Sullivan’s Island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, a few years ago, designer Walter Hood came across an interesting pattern or tapestry of some sort in a small museum there. As he looked closer, he realized that it wasn’t a pattern: It was the outlines of bodies lined up next to each other.
He was looking at the Brooks Map, the document that shows how enslaved Africans were packed into the bottom of slave ships. Sullivan’s Island was a slave ship hub; it was where slave traders stopped before arriving at Gadsden’s Wharf in Charleston, the site where almost half of enslaved Africans entered the country via these ships.