Black cemeteries are more than burial grounds; they are living cultural landscapes that hold layered histories, embodied memory, and ongoing practices of care. Located in both urban neighborhoods and rural landscapes, these sacred sites bear witness to legacies of dehumanization, enslavement, segregation, and systemic exclusion—while also preserving stories of kinship, resistance, and collective survival. Headstones, unmarked graves, overgrown pathways, and handmade memorials function not only as markers of death, but as spatial archives that record how Black communities have navigated loss, belonging, and place-making across generations (Arffmann, 2000; McKittrick, 2006).

In urban and environmental planning, cultural resources are often described as the DNA of place—shaping how landscapes are understood, valued, and managed. Yet, Black cemeteries are frequently rendered invisible within formal planning and preservation frameworks, despite their significance as sites of memory, environmental history, and community identity (Blanks et al., 2021). These spaces reveal how relationships to land, ancestry, and care have been forged under conditions of racialized dispossession, making them critical sites for understanding the intersections of culture, environment, and justice.

Drawing on images and videos collected during my dissertation research, this essay approaches Black cemeteries as sites of visual and narrative placemaking. Through documentation, storytelling, and creative interpretation, these materials do more than record deterioration or loss; they activate memory, invite community engagement, and assert presence in landscapes where Black histories have often been erased or marginalized. In this way, visual methods become both a research practice and a form of intervention—one that challenges dominant narratives of neglect and instead centers Black cemeteries as spaces of meaning-making, care, and ongoing relationship.

By situating Black cemeteries as sites of art, storytelling, and spatial memory, this essay argues that creative and visual practices are not supplemental to preservation work, but foundational to how communities reclaim, remember, and reimagine sacred landscapes. These practices transform cemeteries from sites of abandonment into spaces of continued connection, where memory becomes a tool for placemaking and repair.

To examine Black cemeteries as sites of visual and narrative placemaking, this research draws on ethnographic and participatory methods that center relationship-building, storytelling, and shared interpretation. Observation and interviews were conducted with cemetery stewards actively engaged in managing and preserving burial grounds with varying levels of remaining residents, physical infrastructure, and environmental threat. These engagements took place during Cemetery Management 101 workshops, guided field visits to neighboring Black cemeteries, and community-organized events where stories were shared, recalled, and mobilized to foster collective attachment and long-term stewardship (Blanks, 2025).

Mapping Memory Through Photography

This methodological approach is grounded in an awareness of positionality. As an African American researcher working within rural African American communities, the research process acknowledged both shared cultural context and the potential privilege associated with the researcher’s voice. Rather than extracting knowledge, the research prioritized dialogue, transparency, and collaboration—beginning with relationship-building and evolving into co-produced research design. Community members were actively involved in identifying sites of significance, shaping research questions, and contributing to data collection, reinforcing storytelling as a collective rather than individual practice.

Central to this work is photo mapping, a visual method that allows participants to document sites of importance alongside their geographic location. Photo mapping—and its expanded form, photovoice—connects spatial documentation with narrative, enabling stories to emerge directly from place (Greene et al., 2018). This method was particularly well suited to cemetery landscapes, as it does not require continuous internet access or reliance on memory alone, while allowing for the creation of a robust visual dataset that strengthens site assessment and interpretation (Erfani, 2021).

Through guided tours led by local cemetery stewards, photographs were taken of sites identified as culturally, historically, or emotionally significant. These selections were informed by steward narratives rather than predetermined criteria, allowing meaning to emerge from lived experience. In some instances, video recordings captured oral histories, reflections, or immediate responses to particular locations within the cemetery. An assistant accompanied field visits to ensure comprehensive visual coverage, supporting the creation of layered visual narratives that reflect sense of place, attachment, and ongoing care (Erfani, 2021).

Traditional geographic methods have often excluded Black burial grounds, rendering them peripheral within dominant spatial discourse. By contrast, photo mapping and visual storytelling provide a means of understanding how Black cemeteries are defined, valued, and sustained in the presence of environmental, social, and institutional threats. These methods do not merely document space; they assert presence, activate memory, and contribute to placemaking practices that challenge erasure and affirm Black relationships to land, ancestry, and care.

Focus on Emerging Themes

The cemetery reveals itself not only as a resting place, but as a map of family lineage and connection. Names repeat across rows, dates overlap, and relationships become legible through proximity—siblings side by side, parents anchoring generations. Headstones themselves act as identifiers, their shapes and designs offering clues that extend beyond inscription. A curved top, a handmade marker, or a familiar symbol becomes a way of recognizing loved ones without reading a name aloud, a visual language shared among those who return.

These markers open the door to stories, often carried with humor. Family members recall community entrepreneurs—relatives who ran small businesses, sold plates, cut hair, or “always had something going.” Laughter surfaces easily in these recollections, puncturing the assumed solemnity of the space. The cemetery becomes a site where funny stories travel as freely as grief, where memory is animated through personality rather than loss alone.

As these stories unfold, so does an imagination of place shaped by change. Visitors gesture toward what used to be there—trees now gone, paths once walked, fences moved or removed. The landscape is remembered in layers, with the present cemetery holding the imprints of earlier versions. Imagination fills the gaps where erosion, development, or neglect have altered the terrain, reinforcing the cemetery as a living, shifting environment rather than a static backdrop.

Spiritual leadership threads through this space as well. Church leaders rest among their congregations, and choir directors lie where voices once gathered around them. Their presence blurs the boundary between sacred practice and burial ground, suggesting the cemetery as an extension of the church itself. In memory, hymns linger, sermons echo, and leadership continues—rooted in the land, carried by those who return to visit.

Future of Storytelling in Black Burial Spaces

This storyteller essay draws on visual analysis, narrative elicitation, and spatial interpretation to examine the cemetery as a lived cultural landscape where memory, kinship, and community identity are materially and narratively produced. Video recordings and photographs were analyzed as visual data, with attention to headstone design, shape, placement, and materiality as markers of family lineage and relational proximity. Repeating surnames, stylistic motifs, and spatial clustering were interpreted as visual expressions of connectivity, allowing loved ones to be identified through form as much as inscription. This approach situates the cemetery as a symbolic landscape in which material culture communicates social relationships and collective belonging (Tarlow, 2011; Silverman & Frihammar, 2013).

Storytelling functioned as both method and analytic lens. Narratives shared by community members—including humorous recollections of family entrepreneurs, anecdotes about everyday life, and memories of church leaders and choir directors—were treated as place-based knowledge rather than anecdotal supplement. These stories animate the cemetery as a social space, revealing how memory is sustained through affect, humor, and oral transmission. This narrative-centered approach aligns with participatory and visual research traditions that foreground lived experience and community meaning-making as legitimate sources of knowledge (Wang & Burris, 1997).

Finally, a spatial imagination framework was used to interpret how participants narrated landscape change over time. Gestures toward missing trees, altered paths, and shifted boundaries reveal the cemetery as a dynamic environment shaped by neglect, care, erosion, and development. Memory emerges not as static recall but as an active reconstruction of place across temporal layers. In this sense, the cemetery operates as a site of memory where material form, social practice, and historical imagination converge (Nora, 1989/1996). Together, these methods allow the cemetery to be understood not solely as a burial ground, but as a relational landscape where lineage, leadership, and community presence are continually re-inscribed.

 

References

Memory, Landscape, and Cemeteries

Arffmann, L. (2000). Whose Cemetery? https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2021.1902185

Nora, P. (1996). Realms of memory: Rethinking the French past (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). Columbia University Press.
(Original work published 1989)

Silverman, H., & Frihammar, M. (Eds.). (2013). Heritage of death: Landscapes of emotion, memory and practice. Routledge.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203103919

Tarlow, S. (2011). The archaeology of emotion and affect. Annual Review of Anthropology, 40, 161–175.
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145539
(Useful for framing humor, grief, and affect as analytically meaningful.)

Visual & Narrative Methods

Erfani, G. (2021). Visualising urban redevelopment: Photovoice as a narrative research method for investigating redevelopment processes and outcomes. Geoforum, 126, 80–90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.07.021

Greene, S., Burke, K. J., & McKenna, M. K. (2018). A Review of Research Connecting Digital Storytelling, Photovoice, and Civic Engagement. Review of Educational Research, 88(6), 844–878. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654318794134

Pink, S. (2013). Doing visual ethnography (3rd ed.). SAGE Publications.
(Excellent for legitimizing photographs and video as analytic data.)

Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education & Behavior, 24(3), 369–387.
https://doi.org/10.1177/109019819702400309

Black Cemeteries, Community Memory, and Public Scholarship

Klugh, E. A., & Shearn, I. (2021). A place for memory: The African American Laurel Cemetery. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Blain Roberts, E., & Kytle, E. (2018). Denmark Vesey’s garden: Slavery and memory in the cradle of the Confederacy. The New Press.
(Helpful for thinking about contested memory landscapes.)

Blanks, Jennifer. “Spatial Significance: Black Cemeteries as Repositories of Memory in the Urban Environmental Justice Landscape.” In Political Ecologies of Futurity: Storytelling Plantation Afterlives, Climate Erasures, and Socioecological Justice. Lexington Book, 2025.

McKittrick, K. (2011). On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place. Social & Cultural Geography, 12(8), 947–963. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2011.624280

Blanks, J., Abuabara, A., Roberts, A., & Semien, J. (2021). Preservation at the Intersections: Patterns of Disproportionate Multi-hazard Risk and Vulnerability in Louisiana's Historic African American Cemeteries. Environmental Justice, 14(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1089/env.2020.0044