Airbnb Removes '1830s Slave Cabin' Listing, Apologizes

GREENVILLE, MS — An Airbnb listing for an "1830s slave cabin" in Mississippi has been removed after a TikTok video criticizing the rental garnered widespread attention.

Airbnb apologized Monday for the listing for Panther Burn Cottage at Belmont Plantation in Greenville and outlined several policy changes in a statement obtained by Patch.

In addition to removing the Panther Burn Cottage listing, the company is removing listings known to include former slave quarters in the United States and is receiving input from experts to develop new policies addressing other properties associated with slavery, according to an Airbnb spokesperson.

"Properties that formerly housed the enslaved have no place on Airbnb," the company said in the statement. "We apologize for any trauma or grief created by the presence of this listing, and others like it, and that we did not act sooner to address this issue."

Pushback on the listing gained traction when Wynton Yates, an entertainment lawyer in Louisiana, posted a video expressing disbelief the property was marketed and rented out as former slave quarters.

He was especially upset at some of the visitors' reviews left on the listing.

"We stayed in the cabin, and it was historic but elegant," Yates reads aloud from a review shown behind him. "A slave cabin is elegant?" he repeated incredulously.

In a response video, Yates said former slave quarters and other similar structures should not be torn down but be preserved in their original condition. Current owners of the properties should feel obligated to research the history of those places and find out more about the slaves that were housed there to help provide an accurate history, he said.

"The history of slavery in this country is constantly denied, and now it's being mocked by being turned into a luxurious vacation spot," Yates said in the original video, which has more than 2.6 million views.

The owner, Brad Hauser, recently purchased the property and did not receive access to the advertising assets from the previous owner until after the video went viral, he told CNN.

Hauser "strongly opposed" the former owner's decision to market the property as a place where slaves lived and has no plans to rent out the cabin, he told CNN.

A now-private YouTube video from the previous owner states the cabin was originally a sharecropper's cabin that was converted to a doctor's office. It was relocated from Panther Burn Plantation several years ago, according to CNN.