Black Cemeteries Are Reflection of Deep Segregation History

As a child, Linda Davis and her mother broke clay pots over the gravesites of their ancestors, allowing the flowers in them to take root.

When she returned to Brooklyn Cemetery in Athens, Georgia, decades later in 2009, her grandparents’ temporary grave markers were lost, and shrubs and overgrowth blanketed the site. But it still felt like home to Davis, and she knew then it was up to her to restore the cemetery.

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Similar Black cemeteries are scattered throughout the United States, telling the story of the country’s deep past of cemetery segregation. As these burial grounds for the dead mirrored the racial divisions of the living, Black communities organized to defend the dignity of their deceased and oppose racist cemetery policies.

Many Black Americans excluded from white-owned cemeteries built their own burial spaces, and their descendants are working to preserve the grounds. Racism still haunts these cemeteries, though, and many are at risk of being lost and lack the support other cemeteries have received.

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“There are few areas of life that bigotry and discrimination do not touch,” said Michael Rosenow, associate professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas. “Even cemeteries became battlegrounds for dignity.”

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Black people weren’t the only ones excluded from white cemeteries or who organized to protect the dignity of their dead. The Chinese Cemetery of Los Angeles was established by a mutual aid group in 1922 as a burial ground for Chinese Americans then barred from buying burial plots. Countless Native American tribes have mounted decadeslong efforts to reclaim and rebury their ancestors’ remains.

Many groups built their own cemeteries as “a form of resistance,” Rosenow said. But without the same generational wealth and access to resources, Black cemeteries were at a disadvantage.

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Nadia Orton, a genealogist and family historian who has visited hundreds of cemeteries, said it frustrates her that people assume Black communities are always to blame when their cemeteries are abandoned or neglected.

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She said city leaders are often responsible for the neglect of Black cemeteries or the bulldozing of them to make way for development projects. The cemeteries are sometimes the last remnants of Black communities that have been gutted by projects or gentrified, she said.

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Virginia Rep. A. Donald McEachin has been fighting for legislation to better protect Black burial spaces after noticing in the 1990s how much money was allocated to preserving Confederate graves. McEachin helped introduce the African-American Burial Grounds Network Act in 2018. If the bill passes, it would create a nationwide database of historic Black burial grounds, help produce educational materials for the spaces, and make grants available for further research at the sites.

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