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This study of historic African American cemeteries relies on historical and architectural fieldwork in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee to explore the creation of these sacred places by communities in the wake of Emancipation and Reconstruction in the post-Civil War American South. As segregation took hold of the legal and political structures of the South in the late nineteenth century, African Americans had little choice but to establish their own separate, sacred places, often on the margins of towns and outside of legally defined town limits, defining what historian and activist W.E.B. DuBois called "the physical color-line" separating white and black sections of towns. African American cemeteries quickly evolved into significant markers of identity and community heritage. Their locations today help to identify the historic African American neighborhoods or rural black communities where often residents built schools and fraternal lodges adjacent to the cemeteries. This chapter highlights representative cemetery types: Golden Hill Cemetery in Montgomery County, Tennessee reflects the black middle-class and the Rural Cemetery Movement aesthetic, the Shiloh Cemetery in Macon County, Alabama reflects the different reality and class of the Black Belt and is significantly associated with the victims of the U.S. Public Health Service's Syphilis Study of the mid-twentieth century; the Pierce-Bond Cemetery in Sullivan County, Tennessee, reflects the intimacy of African American life in Appalachia, and the Alexandria Cemetery in Dekalb County, Tennessee, which is one that W.E.B. DuBois wrote about in The Souls of Black Folk, recalling when he taught there. Together the four case studies reflect a property type that is central to the African American sense of heritage, identity, and culture.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-9376-6_33

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