How public cemeteries across the United States historically segregated Black burials, and what those segregated sections look like today.
The Pattern of Public Cemetery Segregation
From the establishment of the first municipal cemeteries in the early nineteenth century through the legal dismantling of formal segregation in the 1960s and 1970s, public cemeteries across the United States typically refused to inter African Americans, restricted Black burials to designated segregated sections, or imposed conditions on Black burial that effectively excluded most African American families. The pattern was nearly universal in the South and was widespread in the North as well, though the formality of the legal apparatus varied significantly by region and over time. The result was the development, alongside the network of all-Black church and society cemeteries, of a parallel network of segregated sections within otherwise white-controlled public cemeteries.
The Physical Form of Segregated Sections
Segregated Black sections of public cemeteries were typically located in the least desirable portion of the cemetery — at the back, along a low-lying drainage area, in a heavily wooded zone, or behind a service road. The land was frequently smaller in area per burial than the surrounding white sections, with markers placed closer together to maximize the use of the constrained space. Permanent monuments were less common, both because Black families were on average less able to afford them and because cemetery rules sometimes restricted the size and form of markers in the segregated section. Perpetual care, where it was offered to white burials, was frequently denied or charged at higher rates in the Black section, with the result that Black sections were often significantly less well maintained than the rest of the cemetery.
Notable Examples
Examples of historically segregated public cemeteries with significant Black sections can be found in nearly every American city of any age. Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta has a substantial Black section established in 1853 that holds the remains of many notable figures of nineteenth-century Black Atlanta. Holt Cemetery in New Orleans is a city-owned cemetery whose Black section served as the principal burial ground for the Black population of New Orleans during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and has been the subject of extensive archaeological and historical study. Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge Massachusetts, the founding rural cemetery of the American cemetery design tradition, has a Black section that is small but historically significant.
Desegregation and Its Aftermath
The formal legal desegregation of American cemeteries in the 1960s and 1970s did not produce the immediate integration of cemetery practice. Many cemetery operators continued to direct Black families toward the historically Black section through informal practice; many Black families themselves preferred to be interred in the section that held their relatives, regardless of the formal legal change. Even today, many cemeteries that have not enforced racial segregation in fifty years remain, in practice, racially segregated in the locations of their active burials. The historical character of the segregated section, however, has been preserved as evidence of a particular and now-illegal pattern of American social organization.
Preservation of Segregated Sections
The preservation of segregated Black sections in public cemeteries faces a particular set of challenges. The cemetery itself is typically owned and operated by a municipal government or a private corporation that may have no particular interest in the historical significance of the segregated section. Maintenance budgets, when they exist, are usually applied uniformly across the cemetery, with the result that historically underinvested Black sections continue to receive proportionally less than they require to recover from a century or more of relative neglect. Descendant community advocacy, often in coalition with local historians and preservation organizations, has been the principal force in addressing these inequities.
Researching a Segregated Section
Researchers interested in a segregated Black section of a historically white-operated public cemetery should consult the cemetery's own records (often more complete for white burials than for Black, but typically extant in some form), municipal records of cemetery establishment and management, the records of the Black churches and burial societies whose members are interred in the section, newspaper obituaries from both the Black and the white press, and the oral history of any descendant community that maintains an active connection to the burials. Documentation of the existence and historical conditions of the segregated section is itself an important contribution to the historical record.