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When I began my research into historic African American cemeteries, I envisioned local residents lingering over old tombstones, reading epitaphs and poignant inscriptions aloud. While some of this vision has come to pass, it became clear that some segments of the interested audience would not be visiting the cemeteries in person. These included older members of the community who were not able to travel easily, busy families, nonlocal descendants, and former community members who were interested in learning about these historic sites from a distance. Withcontemporarytechnologies,suchasonlinedatabasesanddigitalphotographs, I was able to post photographs of individual stones online so that anyone could view them. But I wanted to find a way to interest someone who wasn’t related to the deceased and also to demonstrate how gravestones can reveal the histories of past communities. To achieve this goal I designed walking tours of publicly accessible cemeteries. Most of the cemeteries that I studied were privately owned family cemeteries or werelocatedonprivateland.Whilestatelawsallowdescendantstoaccesstheirfamily burial grounds even if they lie on private land, members of the public would not be granted access. So I began with a public yet forgotten site called the Daughters of Zion Cemetery, named after an African American women’s sororal organization. Daughters of Zion Cemetery Asrelatedinchapter5,theDaughtersof Zionpurchasedacemeteryfortheburialof members and their families in 1873. It lies one half mile from Charlottesville’s popular downtown mall, a bricked pedestrian area for shopping and dining. A fitness center was built across the street from the historic cemetery, and its large picture windows provide a bird’s-eye view of the memorials. From a distance, the markers appear pristine, and their patterning in organized rows is visible. Unfortunately, a visit to the site reveals years of neglect and vandalism, with overturned markers, 10 CEMETERIES AS CLASSROOMS Teaching Social History with Gravestones 150 hidden history strewn bottles, and broken stones. How did such an unusual effort, a mutual aid society’s Reconstruction-era purchase of land for an all-black cemetery, come to this end? Was there anything I could do to reclaim the site’s history and encourage local residents to respect the dead? My first challenge was to highlight the significance of the African American cemetery. Most visitors to this area come to Oakwood, the larger, segregated cemetery across the street. Few notice the unfenced two-acre plot of land, geographically removed from Oakwood by a narrow street, that comprises the Daughters of Zion Cemetery. When mentioned in historic documents, it is often conflated withOakwood,onceapredominantlywhitecemeterywithasegregatedsectionfor “negroes.” Beginning in 1936, the Charlottesville city directories listed the Daughters of Zion Cemetery as the “Oakwood Cemetery (For Colored),” a serious error that continued until 1953, when both cemeteries were incorrectly lumped together as the “Oakwood Cemetery.” Even as late as 1975, a local newspaper erroneously reported, “The heritage of Southern segregation is marked for generations to see in what is now called Zion Cemetery, adjoining Oakwood Cemetery off Cherry Avenue.Calledthenthe‘oldOakwoodsection,’Zionwastheplacetheblackpeople of the city were segregated in death.”1 This implies that the “Zion Cemetery” is a part of Oakwood Cemetery and that African Americans were buried there against their wishes. To the contrary, a segregated section within Oakwood contains African Americans who did not have a choice as to their final resting place, while the Daughters of Zion Cemetery contains the remains of the organization’s members and their loved ones, buried in purchased plots of their own choosing. Some of the invisibility of the Daughters of Zion Cemetery is due to the nature of the landscape. The cemetery lacks a fence or border of any kind. It includes a level portion with dozens of trees and a second low-lying area at the bottom of a steep slope. While it contains almost two hundred markers, many have fallen over orarelowtotheground.Itsproximitytothemuchlargerandbetter-keptOakwood Cemetery camouflages its location within a sea of gravestones. The Daughters of Zion Cemetery sits in an isolated urban corner between dead-end streets, one of which separates it from the larger cemetery. The lack of traffic results in frequent visits by underage drinkers and homeless campers; both groups leave behind copious amounts of trash. This cemetery is unusual in being established by a sectarian burial association founded by women. The nature of this “secret society” coupled with the lack of surviving records gives us few documentary leads. The all-female organization appears to have been one of a dozen or so all-black fraternal societies in Charlottesville , many of which had affiliations to national lodges.2...

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