I first heard about the unmarked African American burial sites in Charleston, S.C., in November 2021, while visiting the city to research an entirely different topic: I was there to photograph the legacy of indigo in the United States and its role in slavery.
A historian there told me the location of a potter’s field in the middle of Charleston that held the remains of over 26,000 people, most of whom were Black. I was familiar with the site; seeking Wi-Fi during my research, I had visited a community center that now sits on the land. There were also two baseball diamonds, two parking lots, a playground and a college football stadium named after a Confederate officer.
But there was no memorial acknowledging the remains that existed underground.
On my way out of Charleston, I stopped at the site to photograph those ball fields and parking lots. I couldn’t stop thinking about the history they obscured. On my drive home to Philadelphia, I wondered what other unmarked African American burial grounds existed in the United States. I didn’t know it then, but I had started a photography project that continues today.
Across the country, African American burial grounds have been paved over by parking lots, performance halls and highways. Some have a marker; other sites have been erased or forgotten.
My reporting first brought me to a strip mall in northeast Baltimore, where a Food Depot, Dollar General and Shoppers World sat on top of the remains of over 10,000 graves. The former site, Laurel Cemetery, was a prominent African American burial ground for over a century before it was closed in 1958. In Philadelphia, an African American burial site also known as the Bethel Burying Ground was in my old neighborhood. I learned of unmarked graves in Ellicott City, Md., and Washington, D.C. The more I asked, the more sites people told me about.
And for an article published in The New York Times last week, I returned to Charleston. In May 2023, the Times reporter Emily Cochrane and I set out to better understand the city’s unmarked burial grounds and local preservation efforts.
The summer heat was already sinking in as Edward Lee, an engineer turned activist, and I drove down an unmarked gravel road in Mount Pleasant, S.C. Our destination was Scanlonville Cemetery, an African American burial ground that Mr. Lee and other activists have protected from encroachment by developers.
At the end of the road, white crosses dotted a wooded area that bled into marshland. A new stone monument inscribed with African American burial traditions stood near the center. I followed Mr. Lee and photographed the graves.
Mr. Lee, 58, wasn’t new to the work of preserving cemeteries. We had met earlier in the week while he was giving a saliva sample to the Anson Street African Burial Ground Project, which is collecting DNA in Charleston to find living descendants of 36 people whose graves were uncovered beneath Anson Street a decade ago, during the construction of an arts center.
This project was different from the work I usually did as a photographer. Many of my assignments involve portraiture, and I spend a lot of time getting to know people in their homes. When I started photographing burial grounds, I focused on landscapes and details of the past, like headstones, or the foundation of an old church. In Charleston, I shifted to documenting the people carrying this history forward.
I attended a ceremony honoring the reinterment of the people found on Anson Street. As dozens of people sat beneath a canopy of oak trees, I watched Bishop Willie James Hill Jr. give a sermon and pray for “the Ancestors,” as the 36 are known. Last year, the Anson Street project commissioned the artist Stephen Hayes to cast the hands of 36 living residents who matched the age and sex of the 36 Ancestors for a permanent memorial.
The attendees hugged as the ceremony ended, lingering together on that warm spring evening. While there was still light, I decided to make portraits of the hand models standing near the reinterment site. They told me how proud they were to be part of the Ancestors’ ongoing story.
La’Sheia Oubré, who helped organize the ceremony and the DNA testing, stood beside me. When I had met her the year before, she took me to her childhood home, a few blocks from the potter’s field I first photographed.
That day, I asked what drove her to do this work. “In African and Black tradition, it’s our responsibility to take care of our elders, whether they are blood or not,” she told me. “It’s our responsibility to make sure when they are laid to rest, it’s clean and respected, and not just bulldozed over to put up a building and be forgotten.”
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