Black people were overjoyed when the Nottoway Plantation burned down. I went to Louisiana to learn more about its horrific history.

WHITE CASTLE, La. — On the front lawn of the now-destroyed Nottoway Plantation were charred relics of atrocities gone by: a pair of flat-back rocking chairs, a wooden end table, and other sorry debris of what — until a destructive fire on May 15 — was the South’s largest intact antebellum plantation.

For more than a century and a half, the three-story, 46-room mansion — built by enslaved workers during the five years that preceded the start of the Civil War — has stood as a symbol of a horrific period in our nation’s history that is still romanticized by those who don’t grasp slavery’s forever stain on America.

In recent decades, the grounds here — soaked with the blood of the enslaved Africans who were forced to tend to it — hosted tourists and, like a lot of old plantations, were regularly rented out as a wedding venue or a conference space.

Let’s face it: The first few months of Trump 2.0 have been full of challenging moments for Black America. The White House is waging war on inclusion programs, states nationwide are restricting what schools can teach about topics like racism and Black history, and many of us are coming to terms with the reckoning that wasn’t five years after George Floyd’s death.

So it seemed like an appropriate time to visit the Nottoway Plantation, which in many ways is emblematic of how some want to whitewash America’s fraught history with race.

The “history” page of Nottoway’s website, for instance, makes no mention of chattel slavery — which made its very existence possible — or that the plantation’s owner held 176 enslaved Africans captive.

When I arrived, I stood across the street from the ruins and gazed at what little is left of the 53,000-square-foot structure that, according to lore, emerged from the Civil War with little more damage than a 6-inch piece of cannon shot, but was devastated by what its owner believes was an electrical blaze.

I watched as a handful of workers — one wearing a baseball cap, T-shirt, and protective gloves — picked through the wreckage and placed whatever appeared salvageable on the front lawn.

They can have it. I wouldn’t want so much as a saucer as a souvenir from that place. To me, Nottoway was and always will be a horrific monument to white supremacy.

“They’re going to try to keep all of that stuff,” said Natasha Jones, a local resident who was watching the workers, too, and who told me her ancestors once toiled on the former sugar plantation. “It’s just the whole essence of oppression, I just can’t get with it.”

The day I stopped by, a small but steady stream of motorists slowed to nearly a crawl to see what was left of the once majestic property — and many visitors were genuinely distraught at the old plantation’s demise.

Nicky Rubio, who is white, was close to tears. “All the history that’s lost, the good and bad,” she said. “The beautiful old home and all the craftsmanship and the era and everything is gone.”

“It’s history,” said another passerby, a white woman who didn’t give her name. “It was the way things was, and I’m not proud of it. It wasn’t right, but that’s how it was back then.”

My sentiments were more in line with those of a Black female driver who, as she drove by, yelled out her car window, “Let it burn!”

I’m certainly not arguing that all plantations should suffer the same fate Nottoway did. But if you’re going to showcase history, don’t just do it through the eyes of the wealthy plantation owners.

Talk about the enslaved Africans dragged to the Americas through the Middle Passage.

Talk about the assaults, rapes, and sexual exploitation that was rampant.

Talk about the slave catchers and brutal overseers.

Don’t dress it up with Gone with the Wind sentimentality and hoopskirts. Honor the workers who built the place and made it what it was — not just the rich folks who benefited from the labor of others.

I hadn’t heard about the fire at Nottoway until memes — many of them humorous variations on “Let it burn!” — started popping up on my social media feed.

Many of the posts — including one that featured the superimposed images of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman smiling in front of the burning mansion — were laugh-out-loud funny, but also telling.

“When I heard it was burning, my immediate reaction was kind of, like, ‘OK, the ancestors were speaking,’” said Dianne “Gumbo Marie” Honore, a New Orleans-based historic interpreter and Creole culture activist.

Honore, who is also a tour guide, understands why some might be upset about the loss of Nottoway, but pointed out: “There are dozens of plantations left to preserve. They are not going to all burn down.”

She said Nottoway presented a glossed-over version of history that ignored the harsh reality of chattel slavery.

“I truly think that they do not want to shift the story because they want to protect what is theirs,” Honore said. “I think more people really want to hear the truth.”

Historians should follow the lead of the Whitney Plantation, located about 40 miles away in Edgard, La., which does a far better job of accurately portraying the past. It doesn’t host weddings. Nor do its owners downplay the reality that 350 people were enslaved on the plantation’s grounds under the worst kind of conditions.

“Plantations are traumatic places where human beings were bought and sold,” Ashley Rogers, the museum’s executive director, said in a statement. “Families were ripped apart. People were beaten and chained and tortured and worked like animals.”

She added, “When Nottoway burned down, people were not angry at Nottoway in particular as much as they were about plantation history more broadly, and especially the ways that these sites have been whitewashed.”

As I left Nottoway, I thought again of Jones, who said her ancestors had actually been enslaved at the plantation. As she pointed out, “They don’t tell that story.”

They should. A memo for all the red hats: America will never become as great as it could be until it makes peace with its past — and that begins by acknowledging it, instead of covering it up.