The racist slave-holding society’s attempt to strip African Americans of legitimate familial and community relationships encouraged them to develop and protect the areas in which they could express their sense of family and community.

Just as African Americans struggled to ensure their right to a funeral, they saw the cemetery as another aspect of their fragile community.”

(David Charles Sloan The Last Great Necessity, Cemeteries in American History. John Hopkins University Press, 1991)

Remembering at African-American Grave Sites

“The process of remembering at African Slave grave sites is an act of discovery. The key word is ‘discovery’ for it expresses a set of multiple processes:

1. The act of remembering via one’s storehouse of one’s historical or collective knowledge.
2. The act of recovery knowledge or “reconstructing history” of slavery and the slave grave site.
3. The act of searching for selves as an individual journey.
4. The act of realizing one’s emotional attachment to that history.
5. The quest to gain understanding of slavery’s ubiquitous past.
6. The verve to jealously safeguard what is true – commemorative vigilance of history and memory of the African Atlantic slave and their grave sites.

--Dr. Angela Leonard. "Remembering at African Atlantic Grave sites." International MESA (Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas) Conference; February, 2004; Padua, Italy

Parting Ways Residents 1755-1908