How African American burial traditions adapted as millions moved from the rural South to the urban North in the twentieth century.
The Great Migration in Brief
Between approximately 1910 and 1970, an estimated six million African Americans moved from the rural South to the urban industrial North and West in what is now known as the Great Migration. The migration fundamentally restructured American demography, established the modern Black urban communities of cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Oakland, and dozens of others, and produced a wholesale transformation of African American religious, political, and cultural life. The cemeteries in which the migrants and their descendants were eventually interred reflect this transformation in detail.
The Establishment of New Urban Cemeteries
In each of the principal destination cities of the Great Migration, the arriving Black community quickly established the institutions necessary to bury its dead. In some cases, this took the form of negotiating access to existing public or private cemeteries, often in segregated sections; in others, it involved the establishment of new cemeteries owned and operated by the migrant community itself, often through the agency of the Black church and the proliferating fraternal and burial society organizations of the early twentieth-century urban Black North. Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island Illinois (serving Chicago's South Side), Lincoln Cemetery in Penn Hills Pennsylvania (serving Pittsburgh), and Lincoln Cemetery in Suitland Maryland (serving Washington DC) are among the most significant examples of this pattern.
The Sending Communities
The Great Migration also fundamentally affected the historic Black cemeteries of the rural South from which the migrants had departed. As the population of many rural Southern Black communities collapsed in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the cemeteries those communities had maintained for generations were left in the care of an increasingly small and elderly residual population. In many cases, the burden of maintenance shifted to the descendants of the migrants, who would return periodically — sometimes annually, sometimes only at funerals — to tend the graves of the relatives left behind. Where this pattern of return has held, the cemetery has typically survived. Where it has broken down, the cemetery has often been overwhelmed by vegetation and effectively lost.
Body Transport and the Insurance Industry
An overlooked dimension of the Great Migration is the substantial industry that developed around the transport of Black bodies from the urban North back to the rural South for burial. Many migrants, even after decades in the North, expressed the wish to be buried alongside their parents and grandparents in the home community, and the Black undertakers and burial insurance companies of the urban North developed an elaborate logistics system to make this possible. The records of these undertakers and insurance companies, where they survive, are an extraordinary source for the genealogy and demography of the Great Migration generation.
The Modern Northern Black Cemetery
The Black cemeteries established in the Northern industrial cities during the Great Migration are themselves now historic sites, with founding dates often in the 1910s or 1920s and with founding populations now several generations in the past. These cemeteries face the typical preservation challenges of mid-twentieth-century urban cemeteries — deferred maintenance, encroaching development, sometimes the bankruptcy of the original ownership corporation — compounded by the gradual aging out of the descendant community most directly attached to the founding generation. Several have been the subject of major preservation campaigns in recent years.
Researching a Great Migration Cemetery
Researchers interested in the burial grounds associated with the Great Migration should consult the records of the principal Black newspapers of the destination cities (the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Baltimore Afro-American, the Philadelphia Tribune, the New York Amsterdam News, the Los Angeles Sentinel, and others), which carried obituaries and funeral notices in extraordinary detail; the records of Black undertakers and burial insurance companies; the records of the African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, Christian Methodist Episcopal, and major Baptist congregations of the destination cities; and the increasingly substantial scholarly literature on the Great Migration and its institutional infrastructure.