‘This can’t be real’: Mississippi ‘slave cabin’ removed from Airbnb

GREENVILLE, Miss. (WLBT) - A “slave cabin” located in Greenville, Mississippi, has been removed from Airbnb after a TikTok video criticizing the property went viral, according to NBC News.

In the description, the Panther Burn Cottage on the Belmont Plantation was described as a “1830s slave cabin.”

It was also used as a “tenant sharecroppers cabin and a medical office for local farmers and their families to visit the plantation doctor.”

The cabin was moved to the Belmont Plantation in 2017, the description adds, and was “meticulously restored over the course of a year.”

“How is this okay in somebody’s mind to rent this out? A place where human beings were kept as slaves?” asked the creator of the TikTok, Wynton Yates, whose video has been seen 2.6 million times. Yates is a Black lawyer from New Orleans.

“I was just dumbfounded when I looked at it at first. I was like, This can’t be real,” Yates told NBC News.

In a statement to NBC News, Airbnb said “properties that formerly housed the enslaved” have no place on the rental company’s website and that they “apologize for any trauma or grief created by the presence of this listing, and others like it.”

Airbnb also told the news outlet that they are working to develop new policies to address properties associated with slavery.

Brad Hauser became the owner of The Belmont three weeks ago and told NBC that it was advertised as a “slave cabin” under the previous owner.

He has since apologized for the decision to host the cabin on Airbnb and promised to provide future guests with a “historically accurate portrayal of life” of The Belmont’s history.

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