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The Erasure of Death | African American Burial Grounds · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

• 0:14
  Kristin: Grim morning and welcome to the Grim.
• 0:16
  Kristin: I'm your host, Kristin. On today's episode, we'll be opening the gate and entering African American burial grounds and enslaved persons cemeteries located in the United States of America.
• 0:27
  Kristin: The aroma of coffee mingles in the air.
• 0:30
  Kristin: The gates stand open.
• 0:32
  Kristin: Step carefully.
• 0:33
  Kristin: It's time to descend into the hauntings of history.
• 0:36
  Kristin: Last week we walked through an idyllic southern graveyard, one filled with men who upheld a system of bondage, suffering, and deeply archaic beliefs.
• 0:46
  Kristin: This week it feels only right that we step onto the other side of history and tell the rest of the story.
• 0:52
  Kristin: Here at the Grim, I try to do the best research possible with the tools available to me.
• 0:57
  Kristin: But when it comes to African American burial grounds, those tools often fail.
• 1:01
  Kristin: Records are heartbreakingly scarce, sometimes non-existent, lost in neglect, indifference, or a government that offered families empty promises instead of answers.
• 1:12
  Kristin: What should have been preserved was allowed to fade.
• 1:15
  Kristin: What should have been remembered was left dormant.
• 1:17
  Kristin: The South hold this difficult contradiction.
• 1:20
  Kristin: Grand plantations, beautiful homes, generations of wealth, and beside them, often beneath them, lives of unimaginable horror, lives most of us could never endure.
• 1:32
  Kristin: Even in death that humanity was fractured, burials were rushed, unmarked, and forgotten.
• 1:38
  Kristin: Remembrance itself was denied.
• 1:40
  Kristin: Slavery stands as one of history's greatest horrors, one that must never be repeated.
• 1:45
  Kristin: Yet even in a society assessed with documentation, with recording every detail of our lives, there is a vast absence, a missing chapter, lost cemeteries, lost graves, lost people, lost legacies.
• 2:00
  Kristin: This erasure was not accidental.
• 2:02
  Kristin: He was born of greed and fear, greed for economic gain, fear of indifference, and it extended far beyond life.
• 2:10
  Kristin: It followed people into death.
• 2:12
  Kristin: Nowhere is that more visible than the ground beneath our feet, and when we begin to look closely, when we count what was taken, the scale becomes impossible to ignore.
• 2:21
  Kristin: The records of thousands, millions of souls stolen from their homelands and enslaved in America are abysmal.
• 2:29
  Kristin: By 1860, just before the Civil War, nearly 4 million people were enslaved in the United States.
• 2:35
  Kristin: 4 million.
• 2:37
  Kristin: Between 10 and 12.5 million Africans were forcibly transported from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade, yet only 388,000 to 470,000 arrived directly in North America.
• 2:50
  Kristin: Through births, that number grew rapidly, turning human beings into generational property.
• 2:56
  Kristin: Yet their burial grounds remain sparse, undocumented, or entirely lost, and their records, if they exist, are even harder to find.
• 3:04
  Kristin: In a system that valued the output of labor over the morality of human life, death was treated as an inconvenience.
• 3:11
  Kristin: It was not something honored or preserved.
• 3:14
  Kristin: It wasn't until decades later from K West, Florida to New York City, that efforts toward remembrance, respect, and reburial began.
• 3:22
  Kristin: And even then those efforts were limited, inconsistent, and remain extremely fragile today.
• 3:27
  Kristin: Prior to America's Civil War, many enslaved people viewed death as a homecoming, a release of the soul, and slavers understood the power of that belief.
• 3:36
  Kristin: When outnumbered, control relied on fear, and any form of gathering, even mourning, even burial, was seen as a threat.
• 3:44
  Kristin: As a result, burials were often swift, unrecorded, and hidden in remote areas of vast plantations.
• 3:50
  Kristin: Graves were marked only with small items, seashells, field stones, personal objects, markers that eroded over time or were unknowingly removed due to the absence of documentation.
• 4:02
  Kristin: Some enslaved individuals were buried within enslavers' family plots or even inside family tombs, yet their names were never recorded.
• 4:10
  Kristin: These individuals are now lost to time, without personal recognition and, without exhumation, or the consent of descendants nearly impossible to identify.
• 4:20
  Kristin: The end of the Civil War didn't bring immediate change.
• 4:23
  Kristin: A system built on suppression simply adapted.
• 4:26
  Kristin: From the 1870s until 1965, Jim Crow laws dominated much of the South, state and local statutes enforcing legal racial segregation and the disenfranchisement of African Americans.
• 4:39
  Kristin: The formerly enslaved people were legally free.
• 4:42
  Kristin: They were not treated as equals.
• 4:44
  Kristin: These laws overwhelmingly favored white citizens, provided inferior public facilities, and enforced systematic inequality, an inequality that followed people into death.
• 4:56
  Kristin: Many cemeteries either excluded African Americans entirely or relegated them to separate sections that were poorly maintained and rarely documented.
• 5:05
  Kristin: In many towns, separate African American cemeteries were established, but deliberately excluded from official multiplicible records.
• 5:13
  Kristin: Even when burial plots were purchased, burials conducted, and headstones erected, those cemeteries were not recognized.
• 5:20
  Kristin: As towns expanded, development followed, and these undocumented burial grounds were paved over.
• 5:26
  Kristin: Even when caskets were unearthed, when maps, witness testimony, and historical records were presented, cities often chose to ignore the evidence.
• 5:35
  Kristin: This was not an accidental oversight.
• 5:37
  Kristin: It was a system designed to erase families, histories, and legacies, ones whose consequences we're still uncovering today.
• 5:45
  Kristin: That erasure, though, is not confined to the South, no matter how often history tries to tell us otherwise.
• 5:51
  Kristin: Slavery in the North was not rare or exceptional, it was common, especially in places like Rhode Island and yes, even New York.
• 6:00
  Kristin: In the New York African Burial Ground, historian Professor Edna Green Medford confronts one of the most persistent myths in American history, the idea that slavery was only a southern agricultural institution.
• 6:13
  Kristin: The burial ground tells a different story from the nation's earliest days through the end of the Civil War, slavery existed everywhere, north and south alike.
• 6:22
  Kristin: The New York African burial ground, once referred to as the Negroes Burial Ground, was not discovered through intention or care.
• 6:30
  Kristin: It was uncovered by accident.
• 6:31
  Kristin: Unearthed during the construction of a federal building in Lower Manhattan, archaeologists estimated that between 10,000 and 15,000 enslaved and free African Americans were buried there.
• 6:43
  Kristin: Over time, the site has been repeatedly violated, its dead disturbed by medical students seeking cadavers, or its soil treated as a dumping ground for industrial waste.
• 6:53
  Kristin: Almost immediately, controversy followed.
• 6:56
  Kristin: Descendant communities demanded a voice, not just in how their remains were being studied, but how their ancestors were being remembered.
• 7:04
  Kristin: Ultimately, Howard University led a multidisciplinary team of archaeologists, biologists, historians, and genetists.
• 7:12
  Kristin: Their work uncovered vital information about the health, labor, and daily lives of New York's early African-American population, stories long denied by written records.
• 7:22
  Kristin: Today the burial ground is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, designated as a National Historic Landmark, and marked by a memorial honoring the free and enslaved men, women, and children who helped build New York City.
• 7:36
  Kristin: New England tells a similar story.
• 7:38
  Kristin: In African American burial sites in New England from colonial times through the early 20th century, historian Glenn A.
• 7:45
  Kristin: Noblock reminds us that slavery reached even the smallest northern communities.
• 7:50
  Kristin: Burial grounds often provide the clearest and sometimes the only evidence of that presence.
• 7:55
  Kristin: White enslavers frequently created segregated burials on their own property.
• 7:59
  Kristin: Of those that remain today, the largest number are found in Rhode Island, the region's largest slave-holding colony and later state.
• 8:07
  Kristin: Many graves were marked only by simple fieldstones, uninscribed and unnamed.
• 8:12
  Kristin: Records rarely exist.
• 8:14
  Kristin: Outside of Rhode Island, where enslaved individuals were often held one or two at a time within households.
• 8:20
  Kristin: African Americans were sometimes buried in family cemeteries without identification.
• 8:25
  Kristin: In Boston, the enslaved were often buried near their enslavers, sometimes even within family tombs, as we mentioned before, the more commonly pushed to distant corners or segregated spaces.
• 8:37
  Kristin: One of the most significant surviving examples is God's Little Acre Burial Ground in Newport, Rhode Island.
• 8:43
  Kristin: Here inscribed tombstones help identify 250 individuals, a rare but beautiful find.
• 8:49
  Kristin: Many of those stones were carved by Pompey Stevens, an enslaved man whose work ensured that their names, so often denied, were preserved.
• 8:57
  Kristin: Nobok also documents how African American burial grounds were deliberately destroyed, while others have been reclaimed and memorialized, including the African American Burial Ground Memorial Park in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and the story continues at one of the nation's most sacred sites.
• 9:14
  Kristin: In our National Cemetery and its honored dead, the African American History of Arlington, historian Rick Murphy traces the African American presence at Arlington National Cemetery back to the earliest days of the Civil War.
• 9:28
  Kristin: Black refugees later called contrabands fled to Fort Monroe after Union General Benjamin Butler refused to return them to enslavers.
• 9:36
  Kristin: As the war intensified, enslaved people from Maryland and Virginia sought refuge in Washington, D.C., overwhelming the city's already limited resources.
• 9:45
  Kristin: Disease spread rapidly through the overcrowded contraband camps and military hospitals.
• 9:50
  Kristin: During a smallpox outbreak, black refugees were relocated to Robert E.
• 9:54
  Kristin: Lee's abandoned plantation.
• 9:56
  Kristin: Thousands died from dipheria and typhoid.
• 9:59
  Kristin: With local cemeteries filled beyond capacity, authorities established a burial ground on that land.
• 10:05
  Kristin: Union General Montgomery Meggs, angered by Lee's decision to fight for Confederacy, ensured the plantation would become a final resting place for Union dead.
• 10:14
  Kristin: Among them were soldiers from the United States Colored Troops, buried in Section 27.
• 10:19
  Kristin: By 1867, more than 3,500 African Americans were laid to rest there, many unnamed.
• 10:27
  Kristin: Some chose what they called freedom names, Abraham Lincoln, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, carved into their headstones as declarations of identity long denied them in life.
• 10:37
  Kristin: These freedom names, however, made it a historical nightmare for those searching for records or family legacies.
• 10:43
  Kristin: Another consequence for burial grounds, one abused by authorities, was abandonment, not from indifference, but from survival.
• 10:51
  Kristin: Lately on the grim, I've been echoing the importance of preservation for graveyards, especially of those in great historical significance.
• 10:58
  Kristin: Many Victorian cemeteries with grand gardens and mausoleums are carefully protected, but small graveyards and burial grounds require preservation as well, and I'm about to tell you exactly why.
• 11:10
  Kristin: After the Civil War, nearly six million African Americans moved north and west, fleeing the racial violence they continued to experience and searching for better opportunities.
• 11:19
  Kristin: This great migration created an enormous strain on graveyards, cemeteries, and churches.
• 11:25
  Kristin: Families were separated, congregations dissolved, the upkeep on burial grounds became impossible, as in remembering those left behind.
• 11:34
  Kristin: Without descendants to stand guard, these burial grounds became dangerously exposed, branded forgotten, inconvenient, or unused by those who stood a profit from the land itself.
• 11:44
  Kristin: Graves resting in neighborhoods that later grew desirable were routinely declared abandoned by authorities, learning a legal path for redevelopment that erased not only history but the dead themselves.
• 11:55
  Kristin: Yet abandonment is a lie written into law.
• 11:58
  Kristin: Sacred ground does not lose its meaning because time passes, records vanish, or families are scattered by force.
• 12:04
  Kristin: The Gulagichi people, descendants from enslaved Africans from West Africa, who continue to preserve distinct cultural and spiritual traditions along the southeastern coast of the United States, reject the very notion that these burial sites were ever abandoned.
• 12:20
  Kristin: To them, ancestors don't disappear when headstones crumble or paperwork goes missing.
• 12:25
  Kristin: The dead remain present, they're bound to the living.
• 12:28
  Kristin: From this perspective, the absence of formal cemetery boundaries or official recognition doesn't strip these places of their sanctity.
• 12:36
  Kristin: A grave doesn't require permission to be holy.
• 12:38
  Kristin: Soil that holds the dead remains sacred without acknowledgement by state or not.
• 12:43
  Kristin: The destruction of these sites has not been isolated to one landscape or one era.
• 12:48
  Kristin: Graves in rural communities and dense city centers alike have been damaged, relocated, or built over, a pattern that continues into present day.
• 12:56
  Kristin: Burial grounds remain under siege, from gender frication and urban expansion to environmental instability and climate change.
• 13:03
  Kristin: This is not a marginal issue affecting only small towns or forgotten spaces.
• 13:08
  Kristin: It unfolds into major cities, in plain sight.
• 13:12
  Kristin: In the closing essay What We Leave the Earth, the African Burial Ground in New York City, David Mills returns to the site that first brought national attention to this crisis.
• 13:21
  Kristin: He revisits in 1991 when the construction of a federal building in Lower Manhattan unexpectedly uncovered the African burial ground, nearly 200 years after it had been closed and buried beneath the city.
• 13:33
  Kristin: The response from the General Services Administration was driven by urgency rather than reverence.
• 13:39
  Kristin: Construction continued regardless, and the remains were disturbed in the rush to complete the project.
• 13:44
  Kristin: This treatment sparked outrage.
• 13:47
  Kristin: African-American New Yorkers organized, protested, and demanded that the dead be treated with dignity.
• 13:53
  Kristin: Their resistance eventually reached the highest levels of government, requiring intervention from a former U.S.
• 13:58
  Kristin: Congressman and President George W.
• 14:00
  Kristin: Bush to halt the mishandling and protect the site.
• 14:04
  Kristin: The remains that were uncovered were later laid to rest beside the completed federal building, and the GSA ultimately funded a memorial and acknowledgement of what had been lost.
• 14:13
  Kristin: Still, the damage cannot be fully undone.
• 14:16
  Kristin: No one knows how many bodies remain buried beneath the structure itself.
• 14:20
  Kristin: Mills described his own search to honor the thousands of people interred there between 1712 and 1795.
• 14:28
  Kristin: Their identities have been erased by history.
• 14:31
  Kristin: No names survive, no birth or death dates remain.
• 14:34
  Kristin: What endures is their presence beneath the city, beneath the building, and within the unanswered silence that surrounds them.
• 14:41
  Kristin: Not all burial grounds after the Civil War, however, were forgotten, desecrated, or dilapidated.
• 14:47
  Kristin: In the years following the Civil War, African American balevolent society graveyards began to appear across the United States.
• 14:54
  Kristin: Quiet acts of resistance carved into the land itself.
• 14:58
  Kristin: These burial grounds were not funded by the state nor protected by institutions that had long denied African Americans even the most basic dignity in life.
• 15:07
  Kristin: They were built by the community, for the community, established by black fraternal and malevolent societies determined to ensure their members were not denied respect in death.
• 15:18
  Kristin: At the time when mainstream insurance companies refused to ensure African American lives, these societies stepped in.
• 15:24
  Kristin: They offered burial insurance, cared for the sick, supported widows and orphans, and created systems of mutual aid in a world structured to exclude them in death, as in life they relied on one another.
• 15:36
  Kristin: The graveyards they left behind tell the story in stone.
• 15:39
  Kristin: Many feature distinctive fraternal markers, uniform headstones and tabernacles, ritual structures tied to specific lodges or orders.
• 15:48
  Kristin: These symbols marked belonging, protection, and identity.
• 15:52
  Kristin: Today they stand as some of the most overlooked yet culturally vital burial landscapes in American history, heritage sites often ignored, neglected, or quietly erased by development.
• 16:02
  Kristin: These societies arose to prominence in the late 19th century, born directly from the systematic racism embedded in commercial insurance and social institutions.
• 16:11
  Kristin: Their burial grounds became sacred extensions of fraternal halls, spaces where community, faith, labor, and remembrance converged.
• 16:20
  Kristin: While some of these sites have since gained recognition as historical landmarks, many others exist that should join them in distinction.
• 16:27
  Kristin: Among the most notable examples is African Cemetery No.
• 16:31
  Kristin: 2 in Lexington, Kentucky, established in 1869 by the Union Benevolent Society No.
• 16:36
  Kristin: 2.
• 16:37
  Kristin: It serves as a final resting place for the Civil War veterans and influential figures within Lexington's black community.
• 16:44
  Kristin: In Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Balevolent Cemetery stands as a recognized historic burial ground for African American citizens whose lives shape the city.
• 16:53
  Kristin: In Washington, D.C., Mount Pleasant Plains Cemetery was operated by the Colored Union Balevolent Association between 1870 and 1890, while Montgomery County, Maryland, holds numerous sites connected to organizations, such as the Order of the Galilean Fishermen and the Independent Order of Moses.
• 17:11
  Kristin: These graveyards were often affiliated with societies bearing names rich with biblical and fraternal symbolism, Morningstar Tabernacle No.
• 17:19
  Kristin: 88, and groups known as the Sons and Daughters or Brothers and Sisters of Moses.
• 17:24
  Kristin: Their names alone speak of deliverance, survival, and collective strength.
• 17:28
  Kristin: Today there are renewed efforts to locate, document, and protect African American burial grounds through such initiatives as the African American Burial Grounds Preservation Act.
• 17:38
  Kristin: On paper, these efforts acknowledge what African American communities have always known: that these sites are not forgotten relics, but sacred ground, physical evidence of how African Americans cared for one another when no one else would.
• 17:52
  Kristin: But the act itself tells a more complicated, far darker story.
• 17:56
  Kristin: While it's often presented as a step forward, the legislation was not championed by African American descendants, nor by organizations actively working to preserve these burial grounds.
• 18:06
  Kristin: Instead, it stands as a symbolic victory, one that appears meaningful while offering little substance, a gesture, a headline, a box checked.
• 18:16
  Kristin: To this day, though the bill is technically passed, it carries no dedicated funding.
• 18:21
  Kristin: None.
• 18:21
  Kristin: It remains dormant, unable to restore, protect, or preserve the sites it claims to defend.
• 18:27
  Kristin: In effect, it's useless.
• 18:29
  Kristin: More troubling still, the act grants property owners of land containing burial grounds considerable leeway, including the ability to seek funding with minimal oversight or accountability.
• 18:39
  Kristin: There are very few checks and balances, few protections for descendants.
• 18:44
  Kristin: The result is not resolution, but yet another legal battlefield, one where families must once again fight for the right to protect their dead.
• 18:51
  Kristin: This concern has been raised repeatedly by Brian Palmer, a Peybody Award-winning multimedia journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, and across PBS, CNN, and the BBC, a former bureau chief of the U.S.
• 19:07
  Kristin: News and World Report's Beijing office and visiting professor of the Columbian Journalism School, Palmer has spent years advocating for the rights of descendants connected to African American cemeteries in Virginia and throughout the United States.
• 19:20
  Kristin: Palmer points out a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the legislation.
• 19:25
  Kristin: While individuals who purchase burial plots may not legally own the land beneath them, they retain ethical and moral rights that cannot and should not be dismissed.
• 19:34
  Kristin: Their connections to these sites are not transactional, it's ancestral, it's enduring, and it deserves legal parity with those who hold deeds but no history.
• 19:43
  Kristin: To deny parity is to repeat the same injustice, this time cloaked in the language of preservation.
• 19:49
  Kristin: Yet in hometowns both large and small, individuals and historians continue the work of repair.
• 19:54
  Kristin: They search, they listen, they gather fragments of lives once dismissed as unworthy of record.
• 20:01
  Kristin: It's because of their dedication that the Grim is able to tell these stories at all.
• 20:05
  Kristin: Many episodes ago, I devoted an entire episode of this podcast to one historian who dedicated his life to preserving the history of a small mining town, collecting names, personal stories, and records others had long abandoned.
• 20:20
  Kristin: That same spirit lives on in projects like the Anson Street African Burial Ground Initiative, which restores hope, healing, and dignity to souls once lost to silence.
• 20:31
  Kristin: Through this work, these stories are not only retold, but relearned, relived, and finally honored.
• 20:38
  Kristin: In Charleston, the Anson Street African Burial Ground Project stands apart for its unwavering commitment to descendant collaboration and gula gichi traditions, guiding every stage of the process from scientific study to reinterment.
• 20:52
  Kristin: Launched in 2017 as a community-led initiative, the work began not with excavation, but with listening.
• 20:58
  Kristin: Regular gatherings invited descendants and community members to ask questions about who these ancestors were, how they lived, and how they should be laid to rest.
• 21:09
  Kristin: African American voices were at the center at every step.
• 21:13
  Kristin: Scientific investigations into ancestry and health were carried out alongside spiritual guidance ceremony and descendant leadership.
• 21:21
  Kristin: What immersed was not simply a study of the past, but a collective act of remembrance, reconnecting Charleston's present to its ancestors whose humanity had long been denied.
• 21:32
  Kristin: Over the next two years, that commitment expanded into every corner of the project.
• 21:36
  Kristin: Youth art programs, a college course on memorial design, public exhibitions, and partnerships with local schools.
• 21:44
  Kristin: One of the most profound moments came from conversations with children who insisted their ancestors be given names before being reburied.
• 21:52
  Kristin: That naming ceremony took place on April of 2019.
• 21:56
  Kristin: The names were bestowed by Natalie Washington Wack, a Yoruba Orisha Austin Priestess, African historian and spiritual leader.
• 22:05
  Kristin: She described the ritual as an important step forward in reclaiming the humanity of people who are most likely forced across the Atlantic under the terror of other humans, who saw them not as people, but as animals.
• 22:17
  Kristin: The ancestors were ultimately reinterred in a public ceremony rooted in West Central African spiritual traditions, powerful, intentional, and long overdue.
• 22:27
  Kristin: These burial grounds will be featured throughout the Grim, but it's this history, layered, contested, and unfinished, required its own reckoning and own recognition.
• 22:37
  Kristin: These stories could not be folded quietly in another episode beside its people, but ahead of them.
• 22:43
  Kristin: Because these places are still here, under parking lots, beside churches.
• 22:48
  Kristin: Many cities that move too fast to notice who they left behind.
• 22:52
  Kristin: The dead are patient.
• 22:54
  Kristin: It's the living who forget.
• 22:55
  Kristin: These grounds ask something of us, not guilt, not spectacle, but attention.
• 23:00
  Kristin: The willingness to listen when the earth speaks, to recognize sacred ground even when no marker remains, because the dead are not lost.
• 23:09
  Kristin: They were buried, and then they were buried again, though, by silence.
• 23:12
  Kristin: Tonight we have opened this past, not to disturb it, but to honor it.
• 23:17
  Kristin: Understanding the history, stories, and physically entering these grounds is an honor in itself.
• 23:23
  Kristin: For now the stories of these burial grounds slip back into stone, and the dead return to their uneasy rest.
• 23:30
  Kristin: Yet they're never silent for long.
• 23:32
  Kristin: Thank you for walking with us through the veil into African American burial grounds and enslaved persons cemeteries, descending once more into the hauntings of history.
• 23:43
  Kristin: The gate is sealed, the veil drawn, yet death keeps no calendar, and so we shall return, as we always do, on the grim.