Skip to main content

Buried history

Nicole Fallert   Paste BN

Brian Palmer was headed to photograph cleanup efforts at a 16-acre cemetery in Virginia when he encountered a group of hunters. People were looking to fire guns on land meant to be a historic burial site for Black Americans. It shocked him. But then it didn't feel so surprising, he thought. The site looked more like an overgrown forest than a burial ground.

What had allowed the sacred land to become so forgotten?

A decade later, Palmer hasn't left the land behind. He regularly traveled from New York to Virginia as a founder of Friends of East End, a nonprofit that for more than a decade has helped maintain the East End Cemetery in Virginia, one of many Black cemeteries across America that are at risk of erasure. His efforts show the patient, careful work required to preserve Black history.

👋 Nicole Fallert here, and welcome to Your Week, our newsletter exclusively for Paste BN subscribers (that's you!). This week, we talk with breaking news reporter N'dea Yancey-Bragg about her conversation with Palmer about the threat Black cemeteries face in the U.S. and what they mean for Black history.

But first, don't miss these stories made possible by your Paste BN subscription:

Protecting history from being paved away

February is Black History Month. While this month is often noted by events and celebrations marking the impact of Black lives in America, the time is also an opportunity to think about the stories we don't always hear about. N'dea Yancey-Bragg wanted to bring the invisible side of Black history to the surface by unearthing the buried past of Washington-area Black cemeteries.

What she didn't think she'd discover was that centuries after slavery formally ended in the U.S., Black bodies are still bought and sold: Burial sites holding Black people have been the target of developers.

"It never left," Yancey-Bragg said of a Maryland cemetery she researched that was paved with asphalt and turned into a parking lot. "Why wouldn't it get to be a cemetery?"

That's a question that implies how Americans value Black lives: Are they worthy of a burial site along side other people? Is their history valuable enough to be legally protected from exploitative investors?

"Black cemeteries are treasure troves of history," she said. "The more you find out about the people there, you learn about a community, ... It's a privilege for people to be able to visit their ancestors in a proper cemetery because so many Black people can't trace their roots and Black cemeteries have been erased."

Yancey-Bragg interviewed volunteers like Brian Palmer who have taken up the mantle of protecting and maintaining these sites year-round. That labor is important to remind communities the sites are worthy of protection, she said.

"It's really important for us to focus on these stories because they've already been erased once and shouldn't again," she said. "People might go by (these sites) every day and not know that they exist."

It's especially important to shed a light on these cemeteries now amid attacks on what's taught about Black history in the U.S. (more about these attacks here). Writing about the legal and personal battles to keep these past lives protected is an effort in building and respecting Black history, she said: "It's important to not participate in that erasure."

Read more Black History Month coverage from Paste BN:

Thank you

This conversation with N'dea has inspired me to explore whether there are any preservation groups in my community. I wouldn't know to do that without her amazing writing. Thank you for your continued support on Paste BN projects like this.

Best wishes, 

Nicole Fallert

Facebook Twitter Email