Volunteers pitch in on cleanup work at historic Evergreen Cemetery, the burial site for prominent African-Americans such as Maggie Walker. (Photo by Jay Paul)
At a weekend news conference announcing legislation to provide federal support for historic African-American burial grounds, 4th District U.S. Rep. Donald McEachin shared a personal anecdote about the significance of the bill he is co-sponsoring with fellow Democratic Rep. Alma Adams of North Carolina’s 12th District.
“For the better part of 50 years, I was like, 'Well, yeah, I'm from Richmond — but I'm not really a Richmonder, because I can't get past my grandfather,’ ” McEachin said of his family’s ancestry at the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia. But thanks to the commitment of volunteers such as the Friends of East End and years of work to raise awareness around Richmond’s African-American burial sites, he learned that his family has been in the River City since just after the Revolutionary War.
“I can trace my family all the way back to that Gravel Hill community of slaves who were freed by a Quaker who died and left them as free people,” he said, “But it's that sort of connectedness that this has provided me, and hopefully will provide others, that 'You know what? I really am Richmond — I've been here for a while — my people have been here for a while,’ and it's such a magnificent feeling, just to share."
U.S. Rep. Donald McEachin speaks at the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia about the African American Burial Grounds Network Act. (Photo by Sarah King)
McEachin and Adams’ African American Burial Grounds Network Act, if passed, would provide federal funding for voluntary initiatives such as those that led to the cleanup of Richmond’s historic East End and Evergreen cemeteries.
Both Evergreen and East End burial sites are in McEachin’s congressional district, which stretches south from Richmond to the North Carolina line, taking in the Chesapeake area. The cemeteries were established as tangible pillars of achievement and dignity for residents who built the sacred grounds for their communities after Reconstruction, but the legacy of Jim Crow-era laws enforcing segregation, combined with insufficient resources for upkeep, have taken a significant toll on the sites.
If passed, the legislation would also establish a National Park Service program through coordination with state, local, private and nonprofit partners to create a voluntary network of historic African-American burial grounds while also providing information, technical support and grants to organizations and institutions to aid in the research, identification, preservation and restoration of sites within the network.
Created in 1891, Evergreen Cemetery is the resting place for as many as 20,000 African-Americans. (Photo by Jay Paul)
To date, there is no official national record or database for African-American burial grounds, and the location of many sites is unknown — although research on the African diaspora, or descendants of Africans displaced through the trans-Atlantic slave trade, indicate Richmond’s historical significance.
“Slavery was intimately connected with life across most of Richmond, but Ancarrow’s Landing (the Manchester dock where ships of slaves were unloaded) and the many slave jails, auction houses, and slave trader sites of Shockoe Bottom and Shockoe Slip are where this legacy is most likely to be materially visible,” writes Ellen Chapman in a 2015 edition of the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter. “As has only been discovered recently ... at least 70 sites associated with slave trading are located in a mere 20 square blocks in the historic city center.”
McEachin told attendees Saturday the idea for such legislation first grew legs during his inaugural year as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, when he noticed how much attention was paid to preserving Confederate memorial sites.
“So we filed a series of bills that ultimately went nowhere,” he explained, giving a nod to state Del. Delores McQuinn, whose 70th District includes part of Richmond and Henrico and Chesterfield counties, for her work successfully championing such issues in the legislature.
McQuinn introduced HB 2681 this year, with its companion SB 1128 introduced by Sen. Mamie Locke, D-Hampton, to add seven historic Hampton cemeteries to the list of burial grounds eligible for funding from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. These bills followed McQuinn’s 2017 measure successfully helping to secure funding for the East End and Evergreen cemeteries.
The latter measure adds to a list of African-American burial sites approved for similar resource allocations from the General Assembly last session in Charlottesville, Portsmouth and Loudoun County; this session — in addition to McQuinn and Locke’s legislation — the state legislature approved funding for six more cemeteries in Alexandria, Martinsville, Suffolk and Pulaski County.
Viola Baskerville, who served in the House of Delegates with McEachin, spoke Saturday on behalf of the trustees of the Virginia Outdoors Foundation — which, since its founding in 1966, has helped preserve more than 83,000 acres of historic sites across the commonwealth.
“I come here wearing many hats, but the one that I'm most proud of is to be a descendant of seven members buried between Evergreen and East End cemeteries,” Baskerville said, “and as I continue to do family research, I will probably find some more.”
If passed, federal resources would build on the organization’s work and that of others, such as Friends of East End, which helped spearhead community engagement and awareness in 2013 when volunteers began spending their weekends dedicated to the meticulous work of preserving the burial grounds of an estimated 17,500 people.
Representing the Friends of East End on Saturday was Brian Palmer, who explained that the restoration effort grew from an informal initiative led by descendant volunteers who formalized the work to create a nonprofit in order to continue “this physical reclamation of the site.”
“The clearing out of invasive species, illegally dumped trash, 1,500 tires and counting — that's the primary focus of what we do, the physical reclamation,” Palmer said. “So in addition to pulling out privet and Virginia creeper and briars and poison ivy, we will honor headstones — grave markers that have been buried for a long period of time, decades, using best practices we've learned over time and informed by the archaeologists who worked with us — we will unearth, rinse, scrub — with a soft bristle brush — let it dry and then photograph it and post it to the Web, including Findagrave.com and websites we've built ourselves.”
Palmer said the group’s efforts are two-pronged: the physical restoration, but also the historical narrative surrounding these sacred spaces.
“They're windows into individuals' lives and they're windows into the institutions and organizations that African-Americans built,” said Palmer, who collaborated with his wife, Erin Hollaway Palmer, on an exhibition showing through March 23 at 1708 Gallery called “The Afterlife of Jim Crow” exploring the restoration of East End Cemetery. “We can see the promise, we can see the power from that single stone — but we can also see the tragedy — it was knocked over, buried under dirt ... we can see the tragedy of places like East End and African-American cemeteries across the country; we cannot forget Jim Crow and what preceded it.”
That context informs current research, particularly considering Richmond’s role as a major center for domestic slave trade after trans-Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in 1808.
“In terms of the African diaspora archaeology of antebellum Richmond, the collections from Lumpkin’s slave jail, excavations at Tredegar Ironworks, a slave market site at ... Cedar and Broad Streets, and the dissected human remains recovered from the Marshall Street well are the most substantial collections produced thus far,” Chapman writes. “Notably, though the city has been defined through its complex history and considerable historical nostalgia (particularly significant for the Lost Cause mythology), the city’s archaeological resources have received comparatively little research focus and preservation.”
In some cases, burial grounds have been paved over to make way for new, expedient construction projects.
“The current state of disrepair, vandalism or neglect — or roads placed over [these sites] — this is part and parcel of the inequalities individuals suffered in life,” Lynn Rainville, a professor at the University of Virginia, told attendees at the Black History Museum. She has spent the last 18 years researching African-American grave sites across Central Virginia.
“It was [after] my arrival here in 2001 to teach at Sweet Briar College when I realized I was teaching on a former plantation that had not only the big house still standing but also the cemetery for the enslaved families,” Rainville said.
“These cemeteries are so very important,” she added. “For families and genealogists, sometimes cemeteries and the data contained within them is that missing link to connect generations, including sometimes making that very important linkage from the 1870 federal census back into the antebellum period.”
This link is critical because very little historical record exists of African-American life predating the 1870 census in the midst of the Reconstruction era. The period marked a Renaissance for the newly freed population. Jackson Ward became such a hub for minority businesses and enterprise that it was coined the “South’s Wall Street” and was home to stalwarts like bank president Maggie Walker, editor and city councilman John Mitchell Jr. and suffragist Rosa Bowser — all of whom are buried at Evergreen Cemetery, built in 1891 in response to the grandeur of Hollywood Cemetery, which excluded African-Americans from burial.
“What happens when you take the vote away from somebody and one group monopolizes political and economic power?” Palmer asked the crowd rhetorically, “They can direct resources to their special and sacred sites and away from places such as East End, Evergreen, Daughters of Zion in Charlottesville … so we have to remember, inscribed in each of these headstones is the love, the power, the resilience that allowed African-Americans to endure and thrive in the face of Jim Crow.”
Sometimes, construction sites unearth the remains of African ancestry, without pause for archaeological excavation and research.
In 1991, the former site of the Virginia State Penitentiary — first designed in 1796 by Benjamin Latrobe, later the architect of the White House and U.S. Capitol — was excavated by researcher Katherine Beidleman prior to its demolition. Unexpectedly, Beidleman unearthed in a courtyard multiple human skeletons, apparently buried in the late 1800s.
“Although some scholars who have studied the materials believe them to relate to an unknown municipal cemetery, historian Scott Nelson and others have argued that they represent the remains of prisoners leased to the railroad in convict leasing,” Chapman writes. After the Civil War, “black codes” were used to enforce disproportionate sentences, often for petty crimes, on African-Americans. Prisoners were forced to build infrastructure such as the West Virginia rail lines, work in volatile conditions mining coal and labor at the Tredegar Iron Works. “Unfortunately, Katherine Beidleman died in 2013 and no report was ever completed for the penitentiary or its burials. The human remains from this excavation are curated at the Smithsonian, where they have been examined by Douglas Owsley and Kari Bruwelheide.”
In April 1994, during excavation site work for the construction of the new $23.5 million Hermes A. Kontos Medical Sciences building on East Marshall Street, crews discovered a well containing human remains used by medical students in the mid 1800s, but untenured university archaeologists were only given a weekend to recover what they could from the “sink fill” before construction continued without pause for a Section 106 review.
Bones and artifacts recovered at the site were similarly sent to the Smithsonian for further documentation and research by Owsley and Bruwelheide, although it would be another 17 years, after the release of psychology professor Shawn Utsey’s 2011 documentary, before VCU would request formal reports on the remains.
Since then, historians and archaeologists have pointed to the well remains as one of the few insights into the antebellum period in Richmond, whose biggest state export at one time was not agricultural crops, but humans — furnishing the Deep South with much of its enslaved labor.
During the same time period, the state’s first medical school — the Medical Division of Hampden-Sydney College operated out of the Egyptian Building on the same lot as the Kontos building, where the well was discovered 25 years ago — notoriously relied on grave-robbers, sometimes called “resurrectionists” or “bootymen” to loot fresh graves of the deceased in the African burial grounds on the outskirts of town, just a mile from the medical school.
The demand for cadavers to operate on was high and often cause for conflict amongst those in the profession.
“There is certainly no city south of Virginia, where the study of practical anatomy can be so advantageously prosecuted ... While at Richmond, not only is the supply of subjects ample, but the temperature is such as to allow the dissection to be continued without interruption from October until March,” a Richmond physician states in an 1837 correspondence to the board at Hampden-Sydney in making the case for establishing the medical school here. “From the peculiarity of our institutions, materials for dissection can be obtained in abundance, and we believe are not surpassed if equaled by any city in our country.”
Shortly before the Civil War, the medical school, by then independent of Hampden-Sydney as the Medical College of Virginia, entered into an agreement with the University of Virginia to divide the body count for instruction, with a reported 27 cadavers sent to U.Va. during the 1858-1859 session, “which suggests MCV probably took in about 54 bodies, if the two schools adhered to the standard formula of keeping two-thirds of the recovered bodies in Richmond for MCV and sending the remaining one third to Charlottesville,” Jodi Koste, head of special collections and archives at VCU’s Tompkins-McCaw Library, writes in a 2012 report to the Office of the President.
After1884, unclaimed bodies of prisoners and paupers became available for medical study in Virginia. But fear of body snatching, especially in Richmond's African-American and poor communities, lingered long afterward.
Indeed, a 1939 editorial in the Richmond-Times Dispatch notes that “many of the negroes laboring in Richmond are ... sent to the Infirmary of the Medical College when they are taken sick. Among them prevails a superstition that when they enter the infirmary, they never come out alive.”
In September 2013, VCU initiated a community process called the East Marshall Street Well Project to learn about the remains and two years later formed a Family Representative Council, a group of community members to make recommendations on behalf of the more than 50 men, women and children whose remains were found in the well; a newborn is represented by two ribs only.
Among the finalized recommendations announced in December are the return of the remains to Richmond to be properly buried. If enacted, McEachin’s legislation could potentially provide funding for the interment and memorialization of the ancestral remains upon their return to Richmond, but as of Saturday, the congressman’s staff said they had not been contacted by the university.
Richmond City Council member Kim Gray, whose 2nd District includes swaths of VCU and the surrounding area, was the only council member to attend Saturday’s meeting.
“I’m just excited to hear that my congressman is sponsoring legislation to preserve African-American cemeteries and burial grounds,” Gray said after the event, adding that she thinks there are potentially sites in the 2nd District that would qualify for federal funding. “There are a lot of churches with grave sites that are pretty unknown, and I'm certain that there are places and spaces that we have yet to discover.”
In 2013, the mayor’s “Revitalize RVA” plan called for developing a city-financed construction of a baseball stadium, hotel and grocery store on 8 acres in Shockoe Bottom. The project was later abandoned, in part to avoid a Section 106 review.
The first black-owned cemetery in Richmond was the Barton Heights cemetery, for which the land on the city's North Side was purchased in 1815. The next year, a new site was built on Shockoe Hill and the city built a jail on the former “Burial Ground for Negroes” in Church Hill.
“Nothing created remains abandoned — even unfulfilled dreams can see the success of others,” John Mitchell of the Enrichmond Foundation said at Saturday's announcement. “I was told the massive overgrowth of weeds and trees actually protected [Evergreen] cemetery from total destruction; nature protected our ancestors until this very moment in time; we are thankful to those who are clearing the way for our stories to rise up from those graves — those true monuments of Richmond's past.”
