Hidden History – African American Cemeteries

One of my favorite gifts of a recent birthday was Professor Lynn Rainville’s new book, Hidden History; African American Cemeteries in Central Virginia.

Her story begins in 2008 when a friend (and archaeologist by profession) called her to report damage she and her husband witnessed as a power company crew drove machinery across an old small cemetery.  The couple went through many channels in an attempt to stop the desecration.  The power company employees were only doing what they were told. The execs didn’t care, nor did the local sheriff’s office. After repeated attempts to deal with the authorities, the couple called 911 and reported a crime in progress according to Code of Virginia, section 18.2-127. They were stalled again.  Hence the call to Professor Rainville.

Many early African American cemeteries were not recorded and Professor Rainville set out to change that. Her book describes her journey to locate and document these cemeteries, but also describes how enslaved people held funerals, their rituals, the role of churches and worship. 

She shares stories of how genealogies and oral histories helped her locate several cemeteries, and how finding these burial grounds helped to connect communities and families again. And then the threat ongoing development poses to these small cemeteries.

I highly recommend this book. The back of the book has a form for evaluating an old cemetery and the stones therein. The process is relevant to preserving any abandoned cemetery.

African American Cemeteries in Central Virginia

I was notified recently of a new book detailing the cultural importance of preserving African-American cemeteries. This book focuses on cemeteries in Central Virginia, but promises to be an interesting read for those interested in the importance of preserving cemeteries. Below is the write-up sent to me:

Lynn Rainville’s book is Hidden History: African American Cemeteries in Central Virginia (University of Virginia Press) is now available. In addition to preserving African-American cemeteries for future generations, funerary traditions, gravestones, and cemetery landscapes illustrate past attitudes towards death and community. Because of the historical importance of mortuary landscapes, cemeteries provide a window into past family networks, gender relations, religious beliefs, and local neighborhoods. In this project we take an interdisciplinary approach, combing anthropological, archaeological, historical, oral historical, sociological, geological, and environmental techniques and theories. These combined perspectives are necessary to understand the cultural and environmental context of historic black cemeteries and uncover the rich cultural and religious traditions that produced these sacred sites.

Lynn Rainville received her PhD in Near Eastern Archaeology in 2001. After a decade of work in Turkey, she returned to an earlier research interest, historic cemeteries. She has taught anthropology and archaeology courses at the University of Michigan, Dartmouth College, University of Virginia, and Sweet Briar College. Her research interests range from slave cemeteries to war memorials, from segregated schools to historic architecture, from enslaved communities on antebellum plantations to rural neighborhoods, and from town poor farms to urban life in the 19th-century. Her work has been supported by numerous grants, from the National Science Foundation to the National Endowment for the Humanities, from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities to the Wenner Gren Foundation, and from various private donors.