The Lives of East End: Recovering African American Burial Grounds

East End Cemetery. Richmond, VA, May 2015.

East End Cemetery. Richmond, VA, April 2020.

Somewhere in Virginia, in tangles of fast-growing birch and poison ivy, the archive of an entire people is in danger of disappearing.

For generations, thousands of historic Black cemeteries have languished in forgotten forests and at the ends of dirt roads all over the American South. Sunk in odd acreages or corseted beneath modern powerlines, the dead wait, their monuments crowned in bees' hum. Perhaps you've driven or hiked past these overgrown spaces without knowing what they are. Repositories of memory. Portals to long-lost worlds. Many of the elders buried here were born into slavery, survived the Civil War, and built vibrant communities in freedom. Now, their descendants have dispersed like dandelion clocks, traveling in vast constellations of knowing and not-knowing.

What is the American way of forgetting? Centuries ago, medieval castle-builders named their underground dungeons oubliettes and buried within them anyone they wanted to forget: political prisoners, unruly peasants, members of rival clans. In America, we've turned that process on its head. We build our oubliettes above ground, by letting weeds grow over certain tombstones, by stacking tires and dumping trash in graveyards, or by slicing highways through historically Black neighborhoods. This "work" began long before many of us were born, the result of decades of selective resource distribution and institutional inertia. It is, of course, a process of terrible efficiency, this American forgetting-machine. We can wall ourselves off from memory, but at what cost?

For the past seven years, journalist and photographer Brian Palmer has been documenting neglected African American burial grounds in Virginia and elsewhere. Locating this work "at the intersection of racial justice and history," he uses visual reportage in service of Black communal memory. Part of the work is collaborative. As founding members of the Friends of East End Cemetery in Richmond, Brian and his wife, journalist Erin Hollaway Palmer, have helped lead volunteers in clearing Virginia creeper from headstones and cutting down the curtains

East End Cemetery. Richmond, VA, March 2020.

Memorial Day at Evergreen Cemetery. Richmond, VA, May 2017.

of ivy obscuring individual plots. They have also conducted painstaking research into the stories of the dead. At the same time, Brian takes photos—thousands of them.

"What we see now is not the full story of what was," Brian tells me. "You can only understand that when you know the history of African Americans and have respect for it." Photograph by photograph, he is building an archive to counter more than a century of decay. In the nineteenth century, cemeteries like East End rose all over the South, even as Jim Crow legislation rapidly hardened the color line. Barred from white cemeteries, Black families buried loved ones in small churchyards and in their own backyards. City dwellers, like the Black Richmonders buried at East End, pooled their resources to establish communal cemeteries. Even beneath the poison oak and fallen leaves, these graves preserve a still-shimmering network of Black intentionality and mutual care.

Like white families, Black elders carved epitaphs and raised funerary monuments, using donations from neighbors to do so. Unlike some historic white cemeteries, however, these grounds received no public funding for maintenance or preservation. "Resources were given to Confederate cemeteries in Virginia year after year by the General Assembly," Brian says. "Nothing for historic African American cemeteries."

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How does a community lose its memory? Decades of segregation, discrimination, and institutional racism have worked their way like creeping vines, prising basic infrastructure and financial resources from local areas. Throughout the twentieth century, as families departed the South for opportunities in the industrialized North and Midwest, untold numbers of ancestral cemeteries fell into obscurity. Meanwhile, city-road projects...