Cemetery Commemorations and Graveyard Ghosts: preserving memory and identity in historic African American burial grounds

• In Event: Contesting the American Narrative: African American Burial Spaces, Death Material Culture and Public Memorial

Abstract

Beyond its functional purpose —a place to bury the dead — American cemeteries serve as outdoor museums that highlight religious and cultural beliefs. In the case of historic African American burial grounds, these sites mirror broader issues of kinship ties, power relations, segregation, and social status. As sites of memory and design, visitors learn about the past from gravestone epitaphs, mortuary symbolism, and landscape design. The issues at the core of the fast growing “Black Lives Matter” campaigns are also revealed diachronically through a study of mortuary inscriptions and the overall condition and patterning of black versus white cemeteries.

In this illustrated talk, I compare the gravestones of enslaved, Free Black, post bellum, and early twentieth-century African-Americas. This research documents an association between one’s socio-economic and religious identity in life and one’s funerary markers. While strong correlations exist, it is clear that mortuary traditions illustrate complex motivations, as expressed by the surviving kin, the wishes of the deceased, and the expectations of the community. In short, mortuary practices may reflect, exaggerate, mask, or ignore aspects of identity and beliefs. Despite the ambiguities, preserved gravestones and cemetery landscapes are rich in material culture and physical memorials to past beliefs systems (both secular and religious). These cemeteries are a unique resource. In addition to containing the last resting place of black Americans, they are museums of African American sepulchral history.

Author

• Lynn Rainville, Sweet Briar College