Having lived in the north until last August, slavery was something I studied in high school and in a 'black history' course I took in college.  I had no visceral sense of it at all.  But living in the south now, I've sometimes encountered relics and reminders of institutionalized racism.  My stepson goes to a high school that was once a segregated 'black' school that is now a magnet school of the arts. But, the greatest impact of any echoes of the pre-civil rights south are the relics of slavery.  The photographs here are of slave cabins on the Kingsley Plantation, an estate managed by the National Park Service that has preserved the main house, many outbuildings, and the ruins of cabins lived in by 60 to 80 enslaved Africans who worked the farm.  They are made of tabby, a locally manufactured building material made of whole and ground oyster shells, then coated with a lime putty also derived from the shells.  Here's a link to a Wikipedia article about tabby and these particular cabins.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabby_%28cement%29

I want to add this link as well to the history of this plantation.  It is a very unusual story, and is perhaps unique in the kind of life its enslaved population lived.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsley_Plantation