An earlier version of this post was originally published by the Collective for Radical Death Studies<\/a> on February 26, 2021<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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In Plain Sight: Reflections Past & Actions Present in Durham\u2019s Geer Cemetery<\/em><\/a> is an outdoor educational exhibit examining the history of Durham, NC\u2019s first public African American cemetery, running through April 3, 2021. Spearheaded by Nicholas Levy and Debra Taylor Gonzales of the Friends of Geer Cemetery, In Plain Sight<\/em>, came together through countless hours of volunteer research, writing, and installation work to recover and share the history of this space and the individuals buried within it. According to the exhibition\u2019s website, this collaborative, community effort is intended to \u201cchallenge us to confront the persistence of long-standing inequity\u2014in death as well as in life.\u201d Composed of ten panels lining the old carriage track of the cemetery, In Plain Sight <\/em>explores the role of the African American community in Durham from the end of Reconstruction through a large part of the Jim Crow era. By examining the community\u2019s relationship to the cemetery and retelling the life stories of those laid to rest there, this exhibition presents a unique approach through which to understand Durham\u2019s flourishing Black community from the end of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taking the space of burial as an archival document through which to study the history of a city or community is an interesting and fruitful approach, provided one takes the time to also consider how flawed that document is. Especially in the case of cemeteries, like Geer, that served marginalized communities and, thus, were subject to various forms of erasure and abandonment, it is critical to approach that history from a variety of angles. I came onto the In Plain Sight <\/em>project rather late in the game, but, having been developing various data-driven approaches to cemetery history in my other work, I saw here an ideal opportunity to combine an aggregate analysis of the cemetery\u2019s known burials with the detailed, case study work that others had been working on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Geer Cemetery was founded in March of 1877 when three African American men\u2014John O\u2019Daniel, Nelson Mitchell, and Willis\/Willie Moore\u2014purchased a two-acre tract of land from Frederick and Polly Geer upon which to establish the first public cemetery for Durham\u2019s African American community. Although there is no known document accounting for all of the burial activity that took place in what would become known as Geer Cemetery, it is estimated that over two thousand burials took place there between its founding in 1877 and its last recorded burial in 1945. Over the ensuing decades, Geer Cemetery became entirely unrecognizable, heavily overgrown and largely inaccessible. Grassroots efforts spearheaded by Kelly Bryant in the 1990s would ultimately lead to, in 2003, the formation of the Friends of Geer Cemetery (FoGC), a non-profit organization dedicated to the protection, preservation, and reclamation of Geer Cemetery and its attendant histories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since then, volunteers have painstakingly worked to compile a comprehensive list of burials, reach out to and engage with descendants, reconstruct the stories of individuals and families buried in Geer, and share those histories with the community. Efforts to document burials in Geer date back to the 1940s when the Works Progress Administration (WPA) conducted a survey of the cemetery; however the bulk of these efforts has resulted from the work of dedicated volunteers, who, since the formation of the FoGC have meticulously transcribed death certificates and burial cards from the public record.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I came onto the In Plain Sight <\/em>project in November 2020, there was already a database of approximately 1,500 individuals with varying levels of detail about their lives. Most commonly, we only knew the life dates and gender since the majority of this work had been done manually over the years. Additional information on individuals and families was collected and well-organized, as volunteers had been regularly doing genealogical research, yet there was no single dataset that combined all of what we knew about Geer\u2019s permanent residents in a single, centrally located document. Though I was met with some skepticism at first\u2014both because of the time constraints and the knowledge that an aggregate analysis would be inherently flawed since records of the earliest burials were not often documented at all since death certificates for Durham only became available in September of 1909\u2014I was able to convince a group of folks to work with me to create a workable dataset. Using the list of people that the FoGC had already compiled, I pulled as much information for these individuals as possible off of the OCR<\/a>ed death certificates available on FamilySearch.org<\/a>, and then used OpenRefine<\/a>, a data cleaning tool, to organize this information into a dataset that could be both analyzed and continually improved as more information on Geer burials was uncovered by our researchers. I set my data crunching team to work with the raw data, and they diligently dove into the FoGC\u2019s files to fill in the information that was missing from FamilySearch, until we had a dataset representing over 1,700 individuals with life dates, last known addresses, causes of death, occupations, marital status, relatives, attending doctors, undertakers, and more. The aggregate collection of these details provided us with unique insights into the circumstances of everyday life (and death) amongst Durham’s Black community. <\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/friendsofgeercemetery.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/in-plain-sight.png\")
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![\"Exploring](\"https:\/\/public.tableau.com\/static\/images\/Ex\/ExploringGeerCemetery\/Story1\/1_rss.png\")