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Purple Coffins: Death Care and Life Extension in 20th Century American South

How deathly rituals affect our perception of personal dignity.

Families, until World War I, cared for the dead at home, burying them within a day of death in handmade coffins and family shrouds. Certainly, funeral directors in large southern cities found a willing clientele, but the rural southerner still buried the dead using vernacular cultural practices and only rarely purchased death goods, like brass handles for a handmade coffin. The federal government’s differing practices during World War I—using funeral directors to mediate between families and deceased soldiers, for example—helped introduce rural southerners to different rituals and customs. Marking graves with headstones noting a veteran’s service rather than a peony bush became the new norm as did the mass-produced coffin that encased a deceased soldier, a coffin that was easier to buy than to construct. In the 1920s, as World War I munitions plants shifted production away from war goods to domestic ones, even the most intimate parts of daily life, like death, became consumer experiences, and expensive ones at that when new death goods were sold by funeral directors. But it was a short step to death goods becoming social and political statements, conferring dignity in an indignant world and claiming a person’s worth at death, especially among Black southerners.

In Memphis, Tennessee, for example, the J.C. Oates Funeral Home regularly sold purple coffins to working-class Black women who used burial society and insurance money to pay for their caskets and their final ride to the cemetery. In southern cosmology, Whites and Blacks believed that no one went to heaven until the last shovelful of dirt hit the casket. Thus, these women believed they would be at their own funerals and see themselves laid out resplendently as queens in a white silk dress on their own purple thrones—purple being the color of royalty. Then, during the Cadillac hearse ride to the cemetery, typically with the top down, all would see their families riding in style in an age when segregation relegated Black southerners to the rear of a streetcar. New funeral goods thus conferred worth in the South on those deemed less worthy by the larger society.