Grave History : Death, Race, and Gender in Southern Cemeteries / edited by Kami Fletcher and Ashley Towle.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Van West

Contributor:

Towle, Ashley, 1987- editor.

Fletcher, Kami, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Social conditions.

Race relations.

Cemeteries--Social aspects--Southern States.

Cemeteries.

Southern States.

Southern States--Social conditions--20th century.

Southern States--Social conditions--19th century.

Southern States--Race relations--20th century.

Southern States--Race relations--19th century.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource.

Place of Publication:

University of Georgia Press 2023

Athens : The University of Georgia Press, [2023]

Summary:

"Grave sites not only offer the contemporary viewer the physical markers of those remembered but also a wealth of information about the era in which the cemeteries were created. These markers hold keys to our historical past and allow an entry point of interrogation about who is represented, as well as how and why. Grave History is the first volume to use southern cemeteries to interrogate and analyze southern society and the construction of racial and gendered hierarchies from the antebellum period through the dismantling of Jim Crow. Through an analysis of cemeteries throughout the South-including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Virginia, from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries-this volume demonstrates the importance of using the cemetery as an analytical tool for examining power relations, community formation, and historical memory. Grave History draws together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, including historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and social-justice activists to investigate the history of racial segregation in southern cemeteries and what it can tell us about how ideas regarding race, class, and gender were informed and reinforced in these sacred spaces. Each chapter is followed by a learning activity that offers readers an opportunity to do the work of a historian and apply the insights gleaned from this book to their own analysis of cemeteries. These activities, designed for both the teacher and the student, as well as the seasoned and the novice cemetery enthusiast, encourage readers to examine cemeteries for their physical organization, iconography, sociodemographic landscape, and identity politics"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

The status quo made picturesque: nineteenth century Macon, Georgia, and its garden of the dead / Scarlet Jernigan

The crown jewel of Kentucky: Louisville's Cave Hill Cemetery / Joy M. Giguere

Sacred ground: how a segregated graveyard preserves the struggles and successes of an African American community in Virginia / Lynn Rainville

Death can not make our souls afraid: Mosaic Templars of America Zephroes in Macon County, Alabama, 1887-1931 / Shari L. Williams

Jim Crowing the dead: a fight for African American burial rights and dismantling racial burial covenants / Kami Fletcher

"We have no further interest in these patients until they die": the U.S. Public Health Service's syphilis study and the African American cemeteries in Macon County, Alabama / Carroll Van West

Profane memorials: burying the martyrs of the civil rights movement / Adrienne Chudzinski

Cemeteries and community: foregrounding Black women's labor and leadership in sacred site remembrance practices / Kaniqua L. Robinson and Antoinette T. Jackson

Permanent reconstruction in Richmond's Black cemeteries / Adam Rosenblatt, Erin Hollaway Palmer, and Brian Palmer.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-8203-6582-3

0-8203-6581-5

OCLC:

1408998101