Preserving Black Cemeteries to Save History

Two weeks ago, I stood in Onisha Burks Memory Gardens Cemetery, an old graveyard behind the main cemetery in Canton, a central Mississippi city with a large Black population. Burks has tall, spreading trees with space underneath that might have held unmarked graves, or graves that had been marked only by paper or wooden crosses, because the bereaved couldn’t afford anything else. Even some new graves bore only paper markers or metal coverings. No headstones.

This 1994 grave in Onisha Burks Memory Gardens Cemetery in Canton is marked only with metal sign from the funeral home. Ann Marie Cunningham/MCIR

There’s history in this Black cemetery. A prominent scholar, educator, and civil rights activist, Dr. Mignon Chinn, is buried here.

Like the rest of the South, Mississippi must have thousands of African-American burial grounds that date to the days of slavery and hold graves of people both enslaved and free.  Some of these grave sites have family plots, where parents and children, husbands and wives, are buried next to each other. These old cemeteries provide preservationists, historians, archaeologists and descendants with valuable information about past residents of surrounding counties.

Prominent civil rights activist Dr. Mignon Chinn is buried in Onisha Burks Memory Gardens Cemetery, an old graveyard behind the main cemetery. Ann Marie Cunningham/MCIR

But too often, no one is taking care of these African-American graveyards or even knows where they are. They become overgrown and invisible; ancient headstones break and crumble; engraved names and dates wear away. “So little survives above ground,” one Maryland  archaeologist said. As these grave sites disappear, the stories of those buried there vanish with them -- in contrast to Confederate veterans’ cemeteries, which are usually well tended, even manicured.

Unmarked is a 2020 documentary about these cemeteries, which exist throughout the South, and why they incite passionate support among descendants and volunteers. Until recently, no one paid much attention to African-American graves at well-preserved places in Virginia like Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello, or at Appomattox Court House, site of the last battle of the Civil War and where Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865.

Today, visitors to Monticello can see its African-American cemetery. Because Appomattox is now under the auspices of the National Park Service, rangers were able to obtain ground-penetrating radar and discovered a large burial ground of enslaved people.

In Virginia, thanks in part to Black state legislators, state funds and support have been dedicated to identifying, uncovering and preserving Black cemeteries, some of which once were part of large plantations. This work isn’t easy: One scholar describes slaves’ burials as taking place at night, often on hilltops, and no markers may have been left behind except in survivors’ memories.

One Virginia cemetery was so overgrown that almost all the more than 600 headstones were no longer visible, and volunteers needed years to clear it entirely. State support is important because it helps secure ongoing maintenance and care for these cemeteries, so that developers’ bulldozers or weeds and creepers cannot take over and obscure Black families’ pasts once again.

Virginia’s Sweet Briar College is a former plantation. Across the road from the Sweet Briar campus is Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a retreat for visual artists, writers and composers. I have spent time there, but I learned nothing at the time about Sweet Briar’s history. Today, I could visit an African-American cemetery and a slave cabin on the campus.

Sweet Briar was typical of very large plantations: The enslaved vastly outnumbered the owners. In 1850, records show there were six Whites and 98 Blacks living there. So, for descendants, Sweet Briar and sites like it demonstrate the economic or military contributions of their ancestors. Some graves are those of veterans who fought in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, or the Civil War. One Sweet Briar descendant pointed out that in the South, “many people are still living near where their forebears were enslaved, and have the names of the enslavers.” Another descendant said she began to cry when she realized, “My family saw those trees.”

Some of Sweet Briar’s buildings belonged to the original plantation, and have been built with bricks that slaves made by hand. In one scene in Unmarked, Crystal Rossom, a Sweet Briar descendant who has two bi-racial daughters, turns a half-brick over and over, contemplating the hands that shaped it.

Some volunteers who work to uncover and clean up these old cemeteries have connections to people buried there whom they have heard about only in “folklore.” One woman was told only that her grandparents’ graves were “down in the (Anne Arundel) country” in Maryland. When those graves were found at Belvoir, a former plantation north of Annapolis, this descendant said, “I was so proud they were buried there.”

Valuable as these cemeteries are to descendants’ sense of history and selfhood, a Black Virginia state legislator says, “You’re ambulance chasing until you can affect policy” and enlist state support. Preservation of Mississippi’s historic African-American cemeteries needs to be policy in this state, too.

 Ann Marie Cunningham is a Columbia University Lipman Fellow for 2020 who will be working with the Mississippi Center for investigative Reporting. She is a veteran journalist/producer and author of a best-seller. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Technology Review, The Nation and The New Republic. Contact her at amc@mississippicir.org.