Until now, Pinterest and The Knot (an online wedding-planning platform) actively promoted former slave plantations as great places to get married. It took pressure from a civil rights advocacy group called Color of Change to convince them to stop.
From Buzzfeed News:
The Knot Worldwide, which owns the Knot and WeddingWire, is currently working on new guidelines to ensure wedding vendors on their websites don’t use language that glorifies, celebrates, or romanticizes Southern plantation history, chief marketing officer Dhanusha Sivajee told BuzzFeed News.
Although plantations will still be able to list themselves as venues, Sivajee said the new guidelines are meant to ensure that wedding vendors aren’t referring to plantations using language such as “elegant” or “charming.”
From a letter sent by Color of Change to The Knot:
The decision to glorify plantations as nostalgic sites of celebration is not an empowering one for the Black women and justice-minded people who use your site/ Plantations are physical reminders of one of the most horrific human rights abuses the world has ever seen. The wedding industry routinely denies the violent conditions Black people faced under chattel slavery by promoting plantations as romantic places to marry.