According to one expert, many cemeteries have been displaced or erased by urban development, especially cemeteries where Black people were buried.
The burial grounds of enslaved people have become something that more and more people are paying attention to.
When Rachel Peric and Nadine Chapman discovered a plantation gravesite in Montgomery County, Maryland, that the county had largely ignored, they decided to ensure the community learned about it. Their attempts to get the site recognized led to a series of lectures from the Chevy Chase Historical Society that highlighted the history of the Chevy Chase area. The first of those lectures focused on the Rollingwood Burial Ground for Enslaved People, which is the burial ground that Peric and Chapman rediscovered. Renata Lisowski, the director of the society’s Archive and Research Center, told NPR that many cemeteries have been displaced or erased by urban development, especially cemeteries where Black people were buried.
“Many have been erased by urban development, especially Black cemeteries — for one, there were no headstones put in place in the 19th century for enslaved people,” Lisowski also says that there are also “known unknowns,” “Who were these people that got buried there? We don’t have their names. They didn’t record the names of enslaved people in the census. They only record the individual’s sex and their age.”