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Collection: Recovering the Black Past through African American Cemeteries

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East End Cemetery

A historical Black burial ground, reclaimed.
via East End Cemetery Collaboratory on May 28, 2020

East End Cemetery (est. 1897) is a historic African American burial ground in Henrico County and the city of Richmond, Virginia. From 2013 to 2020, volunteers led by the Friends of East End worked to reclaim the 16-acre cemetery from nature and neglect.

Years in the making, this map pinpoints the locations of grave markers at East End using GIS technology and drone imagery. As of July 2021, more than 3,300 markers had been mapped, with points indicating their precise positions in the cemetery. Points will continue to be added as markers are found.

About the Map

This map was created by the East End Cemetery Collaboratory, a partnership of the University of Richmond, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the Friends of East End Cemetery. The Collaboratory brings together university faculty and community members to document and curate African American history and culture in Richmond through cemetery restoration and research.

The digital infrastructure for the map was built by Robert K. Nelson and Justin Madron/UR Digital Scholarship Lab, Stephanie Spera/UR Department of Geography and the Environment, and Beth Zizzamia and Taylor Holden/UR Spatial Analysis Lab. The hillshade layer (not operable on mobile devices) was created by UR student Matt Franklin and Steph Spera using a digital surface model, which highlights depressions identified from small changes in elevation across the cemetery.

Data was collected by John Shuck, Erin Hollaway Palmer, and Melissa Pocock/Friends of East End Cemetery, Kristine Grayson and Elizabeth Baughan/University of Richmond, and hundreds of students and volunteers across departments and institutions.

Support for the Collaboratory is provided by UR’s Bonner Center for Civic Engagement, VCU’s Center for Community Engagement and Impact, the UR School of Arts & Sciences Contested Spaces theme year and the UR Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship (CIE) Initiative.

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Collection

Recovering the Black Past through African American Cemeteries 

CORE RESOURCE: Digital history project mapping an African American cemetery in Richmond, Virginia.
An unkempt cemetery

When Black History Is Unearthed, Who Gets to Speak for the Dead?

Efforts to rescue African American burial grounds and remains have exposed deep conflicts over inheritance and representation.
by Jill Lepore via The New Yorker on September 24, 2021
For most of her 74 years, Ruth Ann Hills took a certain innocent pride in her family’s story and its place in Staten Island history. Generations of her family had resided in Mariners Harbor on the island’s North Shore. She and her brother David Thomas live in the house their grandfather built on Van Pelt Avenue. They had found Black ancestors on Staten Island as far back as the 1700s, and incredibly they had all eluded slavery. Or so Hills thought. All of that changed one day in 2021, when Hills received a visit from a filmmaker. Heather Quinlan was working on a documentary about a nearby graveyard. Over the course of her genealogical research, Quinlan had discovered that one of the people buried there was Hills’ great-great-great-grandfather. Neither Hills nor Thomas had ever heard of the man, Benjamin Prine, but his death in 1900 at the age of 106 had been covered by the New York Times and the wire services. Prine, a U.S. veteran of the War of 1812, had been the last enslaved person born on Staten Island, Quinlan told them. A photograph of a man, seated, holding a cane. The photograph has a long caption beneath, that is headlined "THEY CAN'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME." Hills' and Thomas' great-great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Prine. Staten Island Historical Society. Prine had once been enslaved by Peter Van Pelt, a highly influential Dutch Reformed Church minister – meaning that the street on which the siblings now live took its name from the same white family that enslaved their ancestor. “I thought I was a big history buff. ‘Oh, I know about history,’” Hills said. “I guess I was naive.” A crosswalk scene underneath two large street signs that both read "Van Pelt Av." The intersection of Van Pelt Avenue and Forest Avenue on Staten Island. Reece T. Williams/Gothamist

How the Remains of Formerly Enslaved People Came to Rest Beneath a Staten Island Strip Mall

Benjamin Prine's descendants didn’t know about their family ties – or their connection to his enslaver.
by Arun Venugopal via Gothamist on February 9, 2023
Map Green Lawn Cemetery.

An Indianapolis Archivist’s Curiosity Revives Historical Truths

A Black cemetery by the site of the former Greenlawn Cemetery in Indianapolis is now a point of contention as the city plans to develop the area.
by Mary Lee Pappas via Arts Midwest on June 29, 2023
Woman playing piano for African American soldiers.

Black Burials and Civil War Forgetting in Olustee, Florida

Finding the forgotten and racialized landscape of Civil War memory.
by Barbara A. Gannon via Black Perspectives on April 25, 2023
Illustration of the shadow of Mary Lumpkin over the blueprint of Virginia Union University

The Enslaved Woman Who Liberated a Slave Jail and Transformed It Into an HBCU

Forced to bear her enslaver's children, Mary Lumpkin later forged her own path to freedom.
by Kristen Green via Smithsonian on April 4, 2022
A street in the 1940s with cars parked in front of a food market and a barber shop.

Planned Destruction

A brief history on land ownership, valuation and development in the City of Richmond and the maps used to destroy black communities.
by LaToya S. Gray via ArcGIS StoryMaps on July 22, 2020
African American prison laborers.

A School District Wants to Relocate the Bodies of 95 Black Forced-Labor Prisoners

A school district owns the property where the bodies of 95 black convict-lease prisoners from Jim Crow era were buried.
by Meagan Flynn via Washington Post on October 25, 2018
Smithsonian anthropologist Kari Bruwelheide points out details in the sculptures depicting the faces of two enslaved African Americans who labored at Catoctin Furnace in the late 1700s or early 1800s

Faces of the Dead Emerge From Lost African American Graveyard

The bones of enslaved furnace workers tell the grim story of their lives.
by Michael E. Ruane via Washington Post on July 9, 2021
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