Slave Graves
By 
This is what propelled me to create the National Burial Database of Enslaved Americans. When the database is completed, it will be the first national repository of information on the grave sites of individuals who died while enslaved or after they were emancipated. Anyone who comes to the website will eventually be able to submit information about these places and conduct searches.
I am now processing preliminary submissions. It is painful to read about burial grounds that should be revered spaces but instead are covered by playgrounds and apartment complexes. I have learned that many grave sites of formerly enslaved Americans are abandoned, undocumented, desecrated by the asphalt of “development,” and lack any type of memorialization or recognition. The burial grounds are often found incidentally by developers under parks and office buildings, and for many of the sites, oral history is their only source of documentation. (This was the case for my family as well. Grandpa Ben’s daughter, my great-aunt, directed me to his burial site before she died in 2014, at the age of 101.)
Equally distressing are the struggles to save burial grounds that are in danger of being lost. For example, a community in Shelby County, Ala., is trying to rescue a cemetery of enslaved Americans and their descendants from a quarry company that acquired the land it is on. In Queens, N.Y., a church congregation is seeking to reinter the remains of a 19th-century woman who was unearthed in 2011 by a developer digging in what turned out to be a burial ground founded by enslaved Americans.
But of course this is far from just some historic preservation project. Rather:
Our country should explore ways to preserve the public memory of enslaved Americans. Their overlooked lives are an inextricable part of the historical narrative of our country — and not simply because they were the “beneficiaries” of the 13th Amendment. We should remember enslaved Americans for the same reason we remember anyone; because they were fathers, mothers, siblings and grandparents who made great contributions to our nation. Regardless of our country’s history or our ambivalence about the memory of slavery, we can choose to remember the enslaved — the forgotten. They offer our contemporary society examples of resilience and humanity. Preserving their memory contributes to our own humanity.