Collection

Recovering the Black Past through African American Cemeteries

Issues surrounding historic preservation efforts and memorialization of Black history.

created by Kathryn Ostrofsky on March 23, 2024

East End Cemetery

A historical Black burial ground, reclaimed.

via East End Cemetery Collaboratory on May 28, 2020

CORE RESOURCE: Digital history project mapping an African American cemetery in Richmond, Virginia.

When Black History Is Unearthed, Who Gets to Speak for the Dead?

Efforts to rescue African American burial grounds and remains have exposed deep conflicts over inheritance and representation.

by Jill Lepore via The New Yorker on September 24, 2021

THEMATIC CONTEXT: Broader concerns about representation and inheritance (of land and responsibility of maintenance), related to the movement for African American graves-protection efforts nationwide (including the East End Cemetery as well as sites in New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina).

For most of her 74 years, Ruth Ann Hills took a certain innocent pride in her family’s story and its place in Staten Island history. Generations of her family had resided in Mariners Harbor on the island’s North Shore. She and her brother David Thomas live in the house their grandfather built on Van Pelt Avenue. They had found Black ancestors on Staten Island as far back as the 1700s, and incredibly they had all eluded slavery. Or so Hills thought. All of that changed one day in 2021, when Hills received a visit from a filmmaker. Heather Quinlan was working on a documentary about a nearby graveyard. Over the course of her genealogical research, Quinlan had discovered that one of the people buried there was Hills’ great-great-great-grandfather. Neither Hills nor Thomas had ever heard of the man, Benjamin Prine, but his death in 1900 at the age of 106 had been covered by the New York Times and the wire services. Prine, a U.S. veteran of the War of 1812, had been the last enslaved person born on Staten Island, Quinlan told them. A photograph of a man, seated, holding a cane. The photograph has a long caption beneath, that is headlined "THEY CAN'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME." Hills' and Thomas' great-great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Prine. Staten Island Historical Society. Prine had once been enslaved by Peter Van Pelt, a highly influential Dutch Reformed Church minister – meaning that the street on which the siblings now live took its name from the same white family that enslaved their ancestor. “I thought I was a big history buff. ‘Oh, I know about history,’” Hills said. “I guess I was naive.” A crosswalk scene underneath two large street signs that both read "Van Pelt Av." The intersection of Van Pelt Avenue and Forest Avenue on Staten Island. Reece T. Williams/Gothamist

How the Remains of Formerly Enslaved People Came to Rest Beneath a Staten Island Strip Mall

Benjamin Prine's descendants didn’t know about their family ties – or their connection to his enslaver.

by Arun Venugopal via Gothamist on February 9, 2023

METHODOLOGICAL CONTEXT: Sometimes burial sites are themselves buried, and making those sites visible is a worthwhile task in itself.

An Indianapolis Archivist’s Curiosity Revives Historical Truths

A Black cemetery by the site of the former Greenlawn Cemetery in Indianapolis is now a point of contention as the city plans to develop the area.

by Mary Lee Pappas via Arts Midwest on June 29, 2023

METHODOLOGICAL CONTEXT: Sometimes burial sites are gone -- in this case, washed away by a river because African American graves were relegated to the most vulnerable plot of land. Archival research is an important method of discovering this history.

Woman playing piano for African American soldiers.

Black Burials and Civil War Forgetting in Olustee, Florida

Finding the forgotten and racialized landscape of Civil War memory.

by Barbara A. Gannon via Black Perspectives on April 25, 2023

THEMATIC CONTEXT: Awareness of Black burial grounds has increased at the same time as discussions about Confederate monuments have captured national attention. They are two parts of a larger reckoning with our monumental landscape, what has been commemorated in stone and what hasn't, and how that has shaped our historical memory of the Civil War.

Illustration of the shadow of Mary Lumpkin over the blueprint of Virginia Union University

The Enslaved Woman Who Liberated a Slave Jail and Transformed It Into an HBCU

Forced to bear her enslaver's children, Mary Lumpkin later forged her own path to freedom.

by Kristen Green via Smithsonian on April 4, 2022

PLACE-BASED CONTEXT: African American cemeteries are part of a broader landscape of African American history that cities like Richmond are preserving and interpreting.

A street in the 1940s with cars parked in front of a food market and a barber shop.

Planned Destruction

A brief history on land ownership, valuation and development in the City of Richmond and the maps used to destroy black communities.

by LaToya S. Gray via ArcGIS StoryMaps on July 22, 2020

PLACE-BASED CONTEXT: And mapping cemeteries is also part of larger efforts to use historic maps and digital tools to understand how racism shaped urban geographies.

A School District Wants to Relocate the Bodies of 95 Black Forced-Labor Prisoners

A school district owns the property where the bodies of 95 black convict-lease prisoners from Jim Crow era were buried.

by Meagan Flynn via Washington Post on October 25, 2018

CONTRASTING SITE: While many African American burial sites were spaces that served communities, others, ike the mass graves of prisoners forced to labor for the Imperial Sugar company in Sugar Land, Texas, under the convict leasing system, are sites of exploitation. How are the imperatives for preservation and commemoration of such sites similar or different?

Smithsonian anthropologist Kari Bruwelheide points out details in the sculptures depicting the faces of two enslaved African Americans who labored at Catoctin Furnace in the late 1700s or early 1800s

Faces of the Dead Emerge From Lost African American Graveyard

The bones of enslaved furnace workers tell the grim story of their lives.

by Michael E. Ruane via Washington Post on July 9, 2021

CONTRASTING METHODS: What if the people themselves, rather than the places of burial, are the focus of commemoration? DNA and forensics analysis of human remains offer opportunities for a different kind of cultural retrieval.