The Color Line in Death: Continued Racial Segregation of Cemeteries in the Mid-Twentieth Century United States

Ella Zimmerman History Senior Research Seminar Panel: The History of Death The Color Line in Death: Continued Racial Segregation of Cemeteries in the Mid-Twentieth Century United States This presentation will explore instances of continued racial segregation of cemeteries in the US South in the years after the Civil Rights Movement. Focusing on local relationships and social influences, this presentation asserts that the continued racial segregation of graves was due to entrenched social attitudes and shared understanding of relationships within communities and intentional, exclusive regulations enacted by cemeteries. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s was characterized as a time of great upset to the racial status quo, especially in terms of spurring broad desegregation in many spaces. Cemeteries, which have a long history of segregation in the United States, were not immune to these changes. Although integration became the legally protected standard, cases of burial denial based on race still appeared, as the deeply ingrained racial ideologies and hierarchies of the twentieth-century US South did not dissipate immediately once Federal law protected against segregation. Taking a Social History approach to this project, this presentation research focuses on how cemetery segregation impacted the everyday, lived experience of various individuals, centering on the social atmosphere of the time and how people related to and interacted with one another. Using newspaper articles from specific case studies on post-Civil Rights cemetery segregation, as well as contemporary cemetery contract records and legal proceedings, this project will demonstrate that segregated cemeteries were a product of, and contributed to, the contemporary beliefs of racial and social hierarchies. This presentation contributes to the larger picture of segregation and race relations in the mid-twentieth-century US, while also expanding discussions around death as an area for historical exploration.