Freedmen's Cemeteries After the Civil War
How newly emancipated communities organized burial societies in the years following 1865 and what survives of their work today.
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Thematic Guides
Long-form essays on the history, religious traditions, federal recognition, and preservation of historic African American cemeteries. Each guide offers a substantive entry point to a thematic dimension of the wider catalog.
Church-Adjacent Burial Grounds
The role of African Methodist Episcopal, Baptist, and other Black congregations in maintaining sacred ground across the United States.
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African American Cemeteries on the National Register
A guide to the federal recognition that has come, often belatedly, to historic Black burial grounds.
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Preservation Advocacy Organizations
The descendant associations, nonprofits, and federal programs working to protect these endangered sites.
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The Recovery of Unmarked Graves
Ground-penetrating radar, oral history, and the slow work of restoring names to unmarked burials.
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United States Colored Troops Burials
Cemeteries holding the remains of veterans of the segregated Civil War regiments and their successor units.
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African Burial Ground National Monument
The seventeenth and eighteenth century burial ground of free and enslaved Africans in lower Manhattan, rediscovered in 1991.
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Antebellum Era Burial Practices
How enslaved and free African Americans buried their dead before the Civil War, and what survives of those grounds today.
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Cemeteries of the Great Migration
How African American burial traditions adapted as millions moved from the rural South to the urban North in the twentieth century.
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Civil Rights Era Burials
The cemeteries that hold the martyrs and leaders of the modern civil rights movement.
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How to Preserve a Local Black Cemetery
A practical guide for descendants and community advocates seeking to protect a historic African American burial ground.
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Oral History and Cemetery Research
Why oral history is the indispensable resource for any historic Black cemetery research project.
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Segregated Sections of Public Cemeteries
How public cemeteries across the United States historically segregated Black burials, and what those segregated sections look like today.
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Data Sources for This Archive
A documentation of the public sources from which the Hallowed Grounds catalog has been compiled.
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