In 1870 Senator Charles Sumner proposed a sweeping civil rights bill that would ban racial discrimination in public spaces, including cemeteries. The bill was a supplement to the 1866 Civil Rights Act and stipulated specific public accommodations to which African Americans could not be denied access. The bill listed public schools, public accommodations, and “cemetery associations incorporated by national or State authority.”1 The supplementary civil rights bill was part of Sumner’s larger goal of implementing racial equality in the United States in the wake of the radical changes wrought by the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. While African Americans had been granted citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment and Black men were afforded the right to vote by the Fifteenth Amendment, Sumner and other radical Republicans believed that full citizenship would not be achieved until Black people had equal access to public accommodations.2 According to Sumner, his supplementary civil rights bill would make “the Declaration of Independence in its principles and promises a living letter; make it a practical reality.”3 Allowing African Americans to be buried in a cemetery of their choice, rather than forcing them to be buried in Black cemeteries, was part of Sumner’s comprehensive vision of citizenship.
In December 1873 South Carolina congressman Joseph H. Rainey stood before the House of Representatives and delivered an impassioned speech in favor of Sumner’s civil rights bill. As a formerly enslaved man, Rainey voiced his support for the bill and questioned the intent of racial discrimination in cemeteries. “Why is a discrimination made against us in the church and in the cemeteries where we go to pay that last debt of nature that brings us all upon a level?” While death might be the ultimate equalizer, burial practices continued to reify racial discrimination and the second-class status of African Americans. As Rainey argued, access to public accommodations, including cemeteries, was a right of citizenship. “I am not a lawyer, and consequently I cannot take a legal view of this matter. . . . I view it in the light of the Constitution—in the light of the amendments that have been made to that Constitution; I view it in the light of humanity; I view it in the light of the progress and civilization which are now rapidly marching over this country.”4
Sumner and Rainey’s vision, unfortunately, was not realized. The final bill passed by Congress in 1875 was a watered-down version of the original, with the clauses covering inclusion in public schools, churches, and cemeteries removed. The bill guaranteed access only to “inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement.”5
Intriguingly, much of the debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1875 focused on banning discrimination in juries and public schools. Besides Rainey’s speech, there was very little protest over removing cemeteries from the list of public spaces to which African Americans deserved access.6 In the tumult of Reconstruction, as Americans negotiated ideas about race and rights, burial customs that enshrined racial distinctions largely remained unquestioned and intact. While Rainey was correct that death was the ultimate leveler, burials had a long history of reinforcing hierarchies of power that proved difficult to dislodge.
As the early iteration of Sumner’s bill made clear, cemeteries are not simply passive sites of rest and repose, but rather reflections of history, society, and structures of power. This volume interrogates the history of racial segregation in southern cemeteries, in particular, for what it can tell us about how ideas about race, class, and gender were fashioned and reinforced in cities of the dead. Through their cemeteries, white and Black southerners in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries fostered communities of belonging and exclusion. In their continued use and upkeep or neglect of these sacred spaces, southerners demonstrated what was of utmost importance to them. Building on burgeoning scholarship on African American deathways and American cemeteries, this volume starts an important conversation about the relationships southern communities of the living and the dead create, foster, and even dissolve in the midst of social and cultural upheavals.7
Grave History is the first volume to use southern cemeteries to interrogate and analyze southern society and the construction of racial and gendered hierarchies from the antebellum period through the dismantling of Jim Crow. Through an analysis of cemeteries throughout the South—representing Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Virginia, from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries—this volume demonstrates the importance of using the cemetery as an analytical tool for examining power relations, community formation, and historical memory.8
Scholars have established that deathways—the ways in which we die as well as the practices that surround death and burial—are ripe for historical, social, and cultural analysis. Beginning in the 1960s, writers such as Jessica Mitford, Geoffrey Gorer, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and Ernest Becker insisted that American society had an aversion to death. As evidence they pointed to pushing cemeteries to the outskirts of city limits; hospitalization that separates the dead from the living; and ostentatious funerals that embalm bodies and sanitize the dead.9 More contemporary scholarship seeks to point out the limitations of such a theory that Americans deny death. In particular, scholars examining the early and antebellum Black experience in southern slaveholding America have exposed the ways in which death was a central facet of the lives of African Americans.
Beginning with the first Africans forcefully ripped from their homes and brought to America as part of the transatlantic slave trade, death has been ubiquitous in the lives of Black people. In “The Black Experience with Death: A Brief Analysis through Black Writings,” Maurice Jackson argues that the alarming number of fatalities due to the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery came to normalize death and give Black peoples “a different set of expectations [that] form[ed] the secular norm, which specifies that Black people should view death as part of the normal life process, as an inevitable event in a naturalistic context, occurring in the world of experience.”10 Jackson makes clear that death was not de-emphasized and denied but rather accepted; as he points out, spirituals, poems, and literature illustrate how enslaved Black people had a practical and worldly view of death, which they interpreted as the continuation of life. Examining poetry and spirituals, Jackson explains that when the bonded sang about death it was a “covert form of desire for freedom, with death simultaneously representing actual death and freedom—with the obvious realization that the only freedom most of the slaves would find was to occur with death.”11 Jackson particularly cites Claude McKay’s 1919 poem “If We Must Die,” where death is not denied but welcomed as a noble fate for all Black people fighting back against white supremacy.
Taking up Jackson’s contention that death was a common occurrence in Black people’s daily lives, contemporary scholars have examined the ways in which Black people in slavery and freedom have used the ubiquity of death as a means to better their circumstances, forge communal and familial bonds, fight for racial equity, and demand justice. Much of this scholarship has focused on slave revolts, suicides, funerals and the rise of Black funeral homes, and mourning culture.12
The transatlantic slave trade, plantation slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the legacies of these institutions dominated the southern landscape for the entirety of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Southern funerary culture bears the imprints of these institutions. Slave cemeteries became sites of resistance to white supremacy. For the enslaved, death equaled freedom from bondage, which in turn made last rites and eternal resting places that much more important to Black peoples. Burial grounds in slavery and freedom were important sites of resistance, community building, and remembrance. Scholars have written about slave cemeteries and how bonded people took ownership of certain unused parts of the plantation to create these slave landscapes, purposely hidden burial grounds that were among the trees and near water and slave quarters.13 Under cover of night, enslaved people properly buried their kin, fictive and blood, and used these spaces to perform second funerals—last rites rituals that served more as memorials and that could occur years after a person died. The burial place was powerful, because the last rites performed there ritualized the decedent into the family of the ancestral spirits. Following emancipation, formerly enslaved people eagerly erected their own private Black cemeteries to properly bury their dead. They formed burial and mutual aid societies in which they combined their money to establish cemeteries and provide proper funerals for their members. Through such actions, African Americans affirmed their familial and communal bonds and built a robust institutional life.14
Gender norms are also reflected in southern funeral culture. Corpse care was often the purview of southern women, both white and Black. Through the creation and use of the burial shroud, women provided what historian Jamie Warren calls “corpse care,” washing the body and preparing it for burial. This was a frequent part of enslaved women’s tasks, giving these women authority over the last legacy and memory of their deceased kin.15 White plantation mistresses were present during “corpse care,” mourning and emoting with enslaved women but also participating by providing funeral caps and shrouds—material culture to which enslaved women had no access. Funeral shrouds, which were made by women, reflect the gendered division of labor within southern funerary culture. In the antebellum and Jim Crow South, shrouds held importance—they aided the appearance of a decaying corpse, elevated the social status of the decedent, and illustrated to their communities the importance of this specialized skill set that women possessed.16
The legacy of plantation slavery and Jim Crow is also apparent in the unique funerals Black people developed. Homegoings became symbols of power and acts of political assertion. In Passed On: African American Mourning Stories, Karla FC Holloway illustrates how elements of homegoing funerals are products of southern institutions. A homegoing is a celebration of Black life that resists white oppression and Black subjugation with its long procession and regal attire (for both the decedent and the mourners). The funeral procession was central to homegoings and allowed southern Black people to take up literal public space on the roadways and sidewalks as the procession wound its way to the cemetery. To claim this public space during Jim Crow and to force white southerners to stop and observe Black celebrations of life and death were acts of resistance to white supremacy.17
Grave History builds upon this scholarship by focusing on the broader social, cultural, and regional issues engaged by cemeteries in the American South. For the past five decades, scholars have demonstrated that cemeteries were sites of memory and spaces of mourning and are therefore ripe for historical analysis. In his canonical piece on memory versus history, French historian Pierre Nora places cemeteries firmly within the category of memory, calling them lieux de mémoire or sites of memory.18 As sites of memory, cemeteries are simultaneously material, symbolic, and functional expressions of lived experiences and serve as windows to the past. Working to find spaces where marginalized communities find a voice in public society, Elizabethada Wright continues Nora’s framework, arguing that cemeteries were ideal sites of memory—not as storehouses or even as museums, but as purposely constructed environs that help the living remember what is forgotten. Wright’s analyses that cemeteries are cultural institutions that double as rhetorical spaces pushed scholarship to investigate how cemeteries simultaneously mirror and distort society. Wright asks why cemeteries are not only important but natural rhetorical spaces to help Americans understand marginalized experiences inclusive to gender and race.19
Grave History picks up this question and uses cemeteries and the southern communities that created and sustain them to understand how they influenced the creation of an American and regional identity. It interrogates how southern cemeteries were used by discrete groups to create communities of exclusion and belonging based on race, class, and gender. Finally, it explores how cemeteries were sites of power, contestation, and politicization.
This volume focuses on nineteenth-and twentieth-century cemeteries in the South for a few reasons. During the nineteenth century, the rural cemetery movement transformed American deathways. Influenced by the success of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the first rural cemetery in the United States, cities across the country developed their own rural cemeteries. These new, elaborate, and highly planned cemeteries reflected broader developments in American culture as Americans began to romanticize death and the afterlife. Prior to this cultural turn, white Americans had largely ignored their cemeteries. As Stanley French notes, “Graveyards were treated simply as unattractive necessities to be avoided as much as possible by the living.” In the South, corpses were often buried in family plots on privately owned land or in churchyards. The rural, decentralized nature of the region meant that community graveyards were not the norm outside of major cities. But the rise of the rural cemetery movement brought about a significant shift. Cemeteries became spaces that invited the living to interact with the dead and to contemplate the meaning of life and death. Epitaphs on increasingly elaborate graves served as prescriptive literature for cemetery visitors—educating them on the proper roles and virtues to which men and women should aspire.20
This volume makes the case that cemeteries serve as useful tools for analyzing transformations in American society. In the case of the South, the history of slavery, emancipation, and Jim Crow are visible within cemeteries, and indeed, those histories are a product of how people buried and remembered their dead. Contributors to this volume explore these issues by employing methodologies that are diverse and on the cutting edge. Most scholarship on cemeteries has tended to focus on gravestone analysis and the material culture of burials. It is our hope that this volume encourages scholars to move beyond these approaches and apply new methods and sources to cemetery studies. Chapters in this volume use genealogical information, archival research, and oral histories. They position cemeteries as outdoor museums and mine grave sites in an effort to collect material biographies. They use technologies such as geographic information system mapping (GIS) to digitally plot grave sites inclusive of race, gender, class, epitaph, and marker type, to draw parallels between living and death patterns. By applying these varied methodologies, the chapters in this volume demonstrate that cemeteries are fruitful spaces to study not simply how people buried their dead but how they continued to use these spaces to make meaning of their lives, foster communities, and struggle for equality and inclusion.
This volume opens with an exploration of how antebellum southerners used the rural cemetery to curate an idealized reflection of their society. Scarlet Jernigan’s chapter highlights the importance of analyzing southern rural cemeteries for what they can tell us about antebellum society and how slaveholders, in particular, sought to represent themselves even after death. In doing so, Jernigan’s chapter uncovers the antecedents of the Lost Cause, in which white southerners crafted a benevolent image of slavery through the rural cemetery movement. Although they accounted for only 19 percent of the population in Macon, Georgia, in 1860, enslavers bought over half of the 384 lots in the cemetery. By managing impressions in this way, Jernigan argues, white southerners displayed the best of themselves in their Rose Hill Cemetery while enshrining paternalism, the status quo, and its hierarchy. By comparing Oak Ridge Cemetery—a burial ground for Macon’s enslaved people that was founded by white slaveholders, located right across the street—to Rose Hill, Jernigan illuminates how white southerners used the southern cemetery to construct a narrative where slavery was beneficial to white and Black alike, and where slaveholders knew their obligations to care for Black folks. Rural cemeteries, then, can be seen as precursors to Confederate monuments, as they memorialize slave owners’ idealized vision of a slave society.
During the Civil War, southern rural cemeteries became battlegrounds of Confederate identity. The rural garden cemetery movement that swept the nation from 1830 to 1870 reflected most Americans’ changing ideas about death. Death was no longer to be feared, and so the cemetery became a place where the living and dead communed on a spiritual plane within nature. What followed were imitations of Massachusetts’s Mount Auburn Cemetery, consisting of hundreds of acres and marked by life-size monuments and extravagance. White southerners capitalized on the rural cemetery as a means to construct a white southern identity grounded in strict racial segregation. In “The Crown Jewel of Kentucky: Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery,” Joy Giguere reveals how Cave Hill was integral to the formation of a Confederate identity in the state. Significantly, it was women who played a central role in shifting Kentucky from a border state to a bastion of Confederate commemoration. Giguere argues that the death work that southern white women took on, such as brazenly caring for Confederate soldiers’ grave sites, aided in the construction of a new identity for white Kentuckians in the postbellum south. In the postbellum era, the white southern community used Cave Hill to cultivate a white southern identity grounded in strict racial Jim Crow customs. Giguere points out that it was after, not before, the Civil War that racially explicit burial policies restricted “colored persons” from admission unless accompanied by a white lot holder.
The subsequent chapters center on how southern Black people from the late nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries have attempted to assume control of spaces of death to challenge racism and preserve their past. In the wake of the Civil War and the tumult of emancipation, African Americans also turned to their cemeteries as a means of constructing meaning from the ruins of the antebellum South. African Americans sought to capitalize on their freedom by reconstituting their kinship networks and constructing their own communities. Just as cemeteries were central to white southerners’ community building, so they were for Black people as well. During Reconstruction, African Americans embarked on a flurry of institution building, including churches, schools, and benevolent societies. Black-owned and operated cemeteries were part and parcel of those developments. Lynn Rainville’s chapter reveals the fruits of these labors in Charlottesville, Virginia. She documents the lived experiences, struggles, and triumphs of the freed African American women and men in post–Civil War Charlottesville through an analysis of the Daughters of Zion Cemetery. Rainville’s essay shows not only how Virginian culture led to the creation of the segregated cemetery in 1873 but also how throughout the twentieth century Black women’s mutual aid societies repurposed the deathscape for African American burial needs. As Rainville argues, the Daughters of Zion Cemetery was a place where African Americans exhibited their beliefs about death, kinship, race, and status through their grave markers, botanical plantings, and landscape design.
Shari L. Williams’s chapter, “Death Can Not Make Our Souls Afraid: Mosaic Templars of America Zephroes in Macon County, Alabama, 1887–1931,” also examines the funerary interests of Black women living in the South. Williams interrogates the meaning of the special gravestones that Zephroes, Black women who were part of the Mosaic Templars of America (MTA), chose for placement on their graves. Williams’s analysis of the motivations of these women reveals their familial and community attachments and challenges historians’ interpretations of mutual aid societies as the purview of the Black middle class. As Williams demonstrates, in rural Alabama it was working-class African American farmers who joined the MTA. The use of MTA gravestones signaled their commitment to their communities and their desire to achieve more for themselves and their families.
As the optimistic years of Reconstruction gave way to the repressive era of Jim Crow, cemeteries remained sites where white and Black Americans reinforced and contested racial hierarchies. In chapter 5, Kami Fletcher interrogates the premise that death is the great equalizer. In her investigation of restrictive racial burial covenants across the United States, Fletcher shows the insidious effect of Jim Crow segregation on burial patterns that reified and memorialized white supremacy. By following key national, state, and local court cases where African Americans fought against these postmortem white hostilities for inclusion in white cemeteries, the chapter uncovers how Black resistance and struggle for burial rights—the legal right to buy lots and be recognized as legal owners of burial deeds—were an integral legacy of the civil rights movement and a key battleground in the effort to dismantle white supremacy.
Carroll Van West’s chapter continues the examination of the painful legacy of Jim Crow on African American communities living in Tuskegee, Alabama. Centering on Creek Stand AME Zion Church Cemetery and Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery, where African American victims of the infamous Tuskegee medical experiment were buried, West’s chapter shows how African Americans lived under the heritage of the Confederacy and died bearing its scars. Rejecting the idea that their kin would be memorialized as dehumanized specimens, volunteers and civic leaders have taken initiatives as of the early 2000s to designate the cemeteries as landmarks and to take control of their own narrative of just what the Tuskegee study was about and what it means today. As West’s chapter demonstrates, cemeteries and the communities that surround and use them are not static memorials to the past, but malleable spaces where the past meets the present. Through monuments and material culture, they tell the experiences of the dead and the living.
Adrienne Chudzinski’s chapter takes up this contention by investigating the troubling discrepancy between public historical reverence for martyrs of the civil rights movement and their actual grave sites. Chudzinski investigates the burial sites of Emmett Till, a victim of lynching, and Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. The murders of these young African Americans served as watershed moments in the civil rights movement. But as Chudzinski demonstrates, though public remembrance celebrates these children as martyrs, their final resting places are not afforded the same degree of veneration. As part of an FBI investigation, Emmett Till’s casket has undergone several transformations, even suffering desecration in an abandoned shed. The victims of Birmingham’s church bombing rest beneath a sea of headstones in a dilapidated cemetery. Worse still, the body of one of the victims is missing, while another is misidentified on her grave marker. Chudzinski traces the enduring struggle to restore a degree of honor and respect to the burial site of each of these victims. To address the incongruences in public and private forms of remembrance, the chapter focuses on the cultural afterlife of these prominent public deaths to explore the tension that separates revered historical narratives from the reality found within cemeteries.
As this volume makes clear, African American cemeteries are in peril of being damaged and destroyed. Antoinette Jackson and Kaniqua Robinson’s chapter asks what information we can learn about communities whose cemeteries have been lost in the name of urban renewal. Jackson and Robinson contextualize the rich history of the Black community who buried their dead in three cemeteries collectively known as the Oaklawn Cemetery Complex in St. Petersburg, Florida. These cemeteries are now paved over by parking lots and highways. While the other chapters in this volume ask what we can learn from existing cemeteries, Jackson and Robinson interrogate what we can learn about a community in the absence of their cemeteries. Employing a Black feminist anthropology perspective, the authors contextualize the communities these cemeteries served and, in doing so, excavate the vital role Black women played in the varied social institutions that compose African American deathways. From the church to the hospital and to the funeral home, African American women were integral to providing their community members with a respectable homegoing.
The final chapter provides new directions for how cemeteries can be used to dismantle white supremacy and reckon with the past. Adam Rosenblatt, Erin Hollaway Palmer, and Brian Palmer offer an innovative theoretical framework for thinking about the current disrepair of many African American cemeteries and elucidate new methods local communities can undertake to prevent the demise of these important sites. Drawing on years of activism and volunteer work by Hollaway Palmer and Palmer, as well as field research by Rosenblatt, this chapter tells the story of East End and Evergreen Cemeteries in Richmond, Virginia. They document a space where “structural uncaring”—a set of political and social processes that interpose themselves between a community and the care of its dead—is being disrupted by a sustained volunteer effort to reclaim the cemeteries and reconnect them to families and the Richmond area. As volunteers clear vines and cut overgrown grass, they simultaneously take part in what the authors interpret as a process of racial reckoning with the past. As maintenance of the cemetery continues, the process of upkeep and care evolves but does not end.
As the following essays demonstrate, the communities that cemeteries border and the regions they share make cemeteries a significant place for understanding the social, economic, and political life of specific times and places. With this as its base of understanding, Grave History asks readers to consider what burial grounds, graveyards, mausoleums, and memorial parks in the South can tell them about the past and the present. What symbolic or literal, metaphysical or real, and even abstract or distinct imprints from southern culture—past and present—do these cemeteries carry? Grave markers are unique forms of material culture meant to communicate very directly to subsequent generations. At the end of each chapter is an epilogue entitled “Teaching the American South by Learning the Dead.” These epilogues provide primary sources and other resources and activities to allow readers to interrogate the complicated history of southern cemeteries for themselves. “Teaching the American South by Learning the Dead” offers classroom lesson plans for both the teacher and the student, and for both the seasoned and the novice cemetery enthusiast. These activities encourage readers to examine cemeteries for their physical organization, iconography, sociodemographic landscape, and identity politics. While readers might not be able to visit each cemetery mentioned in this volume, the epilogues offer an opportunity to do the work of a historian and apply the arguments made in each chapter to their own analysis of the history of southern cemeteries. One of the important aspects of these epilogues is that they can be applied to other cemeteries across the United States and perhaps beyond. We want readers who are not from the South to think about what the cemeteries around them can reveal about the past and the present. Thus we hope to spur discussion of the importance of using cemeteries as a lens to explore the past, make sense of the present, and shape the future.
The chapters and epilogues that follow offer new perspectives on southern history and serve as a jumping-off point for additional research into the connections between cemeteries and historical transformations. While each chapter focuses on a different cemetery, some broad themes arise. These chapters make clear that southern culture, policies, politics, and social norms have shaped the creation, development, and function of cemeteries. The institution of slavery left an indelible mark on the landscape of the South that has been preserved in its cemeteries. Segregation of white and Black bodies—even in death—is a vestige of this painful history that Americans continue to wrestle with today.
While race is clearly a factor in the creation and use of cemeteries, gender also is reflected in the southern landscape. The following chapters make clear that women were central to the creation and upkeep of cemeteries and were key political actors and community organizers. Expanding their traditional domestic role as caretakers of the dead, white women organized ladies’ memorial associations and raised funds to create rural cemeteries and erect Confederate monuments. They planned Decoration Day festivities to honor the Confederate dead. Through these actions, white women were crucial actors in creating the myth of the Lost Cause. Likewise, African American women organized into mutual aid societies that were charged with creating and maintaining Black cemeteries. Under their stewardship, Black cemeteries such as the Daughters of Zion Cemetery enshrined and celebrated the advances freedpeople made following enslavement. As African Americans fought to dismantle Jim Crow, Black mothers took on a significant role in the fight against white supremacy. While the story of Mamie Till-Mobley demanding an open casket funeral for her murdered son, Emmett, is well known, Till-Mobley was not alone in using the death of a loved one to combat white supremacy. Black women used their role as mothers as a shield in their activist crusades for burial rights and rose up as civic leaders to repurpose burial grounds for Black burial needs, changing and claiming the narrative for their own healing commemorative efforts.
Finally, the preservation, upkeep, and use of cemeteries are political acts and illuminate the stories Americans privilege when it comes to their past. The continued veneration and maintenance of Confederate monuments in cemeteries reflect some Americans’ commitment to white supremacy. Likewise, the neglect, disrepair, and destruction of African American cemeteries demonstrate the willful ignorance of some Americans to African American history. As Christopher Petrella notes, “The fight to save . . . historic African American cemeteries around the country demonstrates that the movement for racial justice spans space and time. If Black burial sites are struggling to survive, then so, too, is Black history. Contestations over history, memory, and space reveal just how much is at stake in efforts to preserve the Black past, present, and future.”21 As African Americans struggle to convince white America that Black lives matter, cemeteries remain crucial sites for preserving Black history and remind us that Black deaths matter.
The communities that southern cemeteries serve are reflected in the landscapes of the South and etched in stone on monuments and grave markers within cemetery walls. While cemeteries are places of memorialization and remembrance, the uses to which the living have put the dead changed with the demands of the era. The subsequent chapters disabuse us of the idea that cemeteries are quiet, contemplative spaces. Indeed, southern cemeteries are actually active battlegrounds where Americans—living and dead—grappled and continue to struggle with some of the most pressing issues of our time.
Notes
1. Congressional Globe, 41 Cong., 2 Sess., 3434.
2. Please note that the word “Black” is capitalized whereas “white” remains lowercase throughout. The editors have chosen to do so in accordance with the 2020 change by the vast majority of mainstream style guides, including the Associated Press and the Chicago Manual of Style. For more, see Nancy Coleman, “Why We’re Capitalizing Black,” New York Times, July 2, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black.html; “Black and White: A Matter of Capitalization,” CMOS Shop Talk (blog), June 22, 2020, https://cmosshoptalk.com/2020/06/22/Black-and-white-a-matter-of-capitalization/.
3. Congressional Globe, 42 Cong., 2 Sess., 3738.
4. New National Era, December 25, 1873.
5. “Act to Protect All Citizens,” 335–37.
6. For more on the Civil Rights Act of 1875, see Murphy, “Civil Rights Law of 1875”; McPherson, “Abolitionists and the Civil Rights Act of 1875”; Foner, Reconstruction, 504–5, 532–34, 552–56; Masur, Example for All the Land, 224–32; Stanley, “Slave Emancipation and the Revolutionizing of Human Rights.”
7. Some of the most influential works on American cemeteries include Laderman: Sacred Remains; McElya, Politics of Mourning; Rainville, Hidden History; Sloane, Last Great Necessity; Ryan Smith, Death and Rebirth in a Southern City; Roberta Wright and Wilbur Wright, Lay Down Body.
8. Please note that Missouri is not traditionally categorized as a southern state. Missouri cemeteries are included in this volume because Missouri was a slave state when it joined the Union in 1820 to counterbalance the free state of Maine that joined at the same time.
9. For more on death denial theory, see Mitford, American Way of Death; Gorer, “Pornography of Death”; Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying; Becker, Denial of Death.
10. Jackson, “Black Experience with Death,” 204.
11. Ibid., 204–5.
12. In recent years, there has been a profusion of scholarship that uses death as an analytical tool to explore power dynamics between white and Black people from enslavement to freedom. See Taylor, If We Must Die; Snyder, Power to Die; Berry, Price for Their Pound of Flesh; Sommerville, Aberration of Mind; Warren, “To Claim One’s Own”; Fletcher, “African American Mourning Practices and Burial Traditions”; Holloway, Passed On; McCusker, “Purple Coffins and Cadillac Hearses”; Suzanne Smith, To Serve the Living; Booker, Nine Years Under; Plater, African American Entrepreneurship.
13. For more on slave cemeteries, see Rainville, Hidden History; Roberta Wright and Wilbur Wright, Lay Down Body; Jamieson, “Material Culture and Social Death”; King, “Separated by Death and Color”; Garman, “Viewing the Color Line”; Little, “Afro-American Gravemarkers in North Carolina”; Ashcraft, “Carving a Path to Freedom”; Malloy and Malloy, “Slavery in Colonial Massachusetts”; Krüger-Kahloula, “Tributes in Stone and Lapidary Lapses.”
14. For more on Black burial societies, see Blassingame, Black New Orleans;
Fitzgerald, Urban Emancipation; Hinks and Kantrowitz, All Men Free and Brethren; Levine, “Single Standard of Civilization”; Rainville, Hidden History, 74.
15. Warren, “To Claim One’s Own.”
16. Ibid.; Rundbland, “Exhuming Women’s Premarket Duties”; Aldridge, “Dress in the United States of America.”
17. Holloway, Passed On; Fletcher, “African American Mourning Practices and Burial Traditions.”
18. Nora, “Between Memory and History.”
19. Elizabethada Wright, “More Than a ‘Heap of Dust.’”
20. French, “Cemetery as Cultural Institution.”
21. Petrella, “Gentrification Is Erasing Black Cemeteries.”
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