What I believe to be the oldest surviving gravestone for a Black person in the Americas memorializes an enslaved teenager named Cicely.
Cicely’s body is interred across from Harvard’s Johnston Gate in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She died in 1714 during a measles epidemic brought to the college by a student after the summer recess of 1713. Another tombstone in the same burial ground remembers Jane, an enslaved woman who died in 1741 during an outbreak of diphtheria, or “throat distemper.”
When diseases struck in the Colonial era, many city residents fled to the safety of the country. Poor and enslaved people, like Jane and Cicely – the essential frontline workers of the time – stayed behind.
Why were Cicely and Jane memorialized when so many other enslaved people were not? The archival record doesn’t provide a clear answer, but the question of who should be remembered with monuments and commemorations is timely.
Throughout the United States, as COVID-19 affects frontline workers and communities of color far more than other demographic groups, and protesters agitate for racial justice, American society is wrestling with its racial memory and judging which monuments and memorials deserve a place.
Against this backdrop, I believe it’s important to look back at how a few marginalized and oppressed people who served on the front lines of prior epidemics have been treated and remembered. After all, those whom society chooses to memorialize reflect what accomplishments – honorable or horrific – society values.
Unsung sacrifices
The lives, labor and sacrifices of women and girls of color have been overlooked for centuries. Of the 3.5 million books in Widener Library – the centerpiece of Harvard’s vast library system – I found that not one was devoted to Cicely or Jane, and few focus on women like them.
For early-American historians of Northern slavery like me, such fragmentary and untold stories are both intriguing and challenging. But this particular story was also personal, because when I first stumbled on Cicely’s tombstone, I was also a Black teen.
I was a sophomore studying history at Harvard when I came upon the headstone while wandering in the Colonial-era graveyard adjacent to campus. It had a carving of a death’s head on top and winding vines down the sides. It was both ordinary and extraordinary – it looked like other tombstones in the graveyard, but this one memorialized a young Black girl.