Misuse and Abandonment of African American Cemeteries: How Social Inequalities Persist in Death in the Post Civil War Southeast

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This study explores how African American cemeteries in the Southeast have faced environmental and human threats, which makes it difficult for descendant communities to piece together their backgrounds. American law offers some protections against the intentional desecration of cemeteries, yet the maintenance and landscaping of individual cemeteries is left to the responsibility of local officials, resulting in a lack of preservation that disproportionately affects historically African American burial spaces. The Geer Cemetery in Durham, North Carolina, and the Oberlin Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina serve as case studies where volunteer organizations intervened and currently work to preserve the integrity of the grave markers, collaborate with descendants, and, in the case of Geer Cemetery, obtain a National Register nomination. Collaborative research with these organizations focuses on returning agency to the interred through GIS mapping of grave markers, genealogical research to aid in location of descendants, and comparative research of vital records with local, historically whites-only cemeteries to illustrate differences in health. Finally, this research will be used to create a fictive, bio-historical narrative to engage the broader community and encourage continued preservation of these burial spaces.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40178.0