The Jakarta Post
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search resultsIn US, forgotten black cemeteries rediscovered
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
Caretaker: A volunteer who came to maintain the cemetery mows the lawn on the Day of Action at the Olivewood Cemetery. (AFP/Cécile Clocheret)
T
he babies are gone and so are the veterans. Buried at the edge of an African-American cemetery in the United States city of Houston, their bodies were washed away by a nearby bayou during major storms in past decades.
Under the blazing Texas sun, dozens of volunteers mowed grass and cleaned tombstones recently to help save what is left of Olivewood Cemetery's 4,000 graves.
Some parts of the cemetery at first appear forgotten, with broken or dirty headstones.
But the graveyard is in fact receiving newfound care — part of a modern push to preserve black heritage, as interest in saving neglected or even erased African-American historical sites spikes.
The "George Floyd murder, I think it just was a crystallizing moment," said Antoinette Jackson, a professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida, explaining the new interest in such places.
African-American cemeteries "have been continually erased and information about them silenced," she said.
Margott Williams, president of the Descendants of Olivewood nonprofit, laments those whose graves have washed away at the Houston cemetery: "There were babies back there. I don't see my babies back there anymore. There were veterans back there. I don't see my veterans back there."
More from The Weekender
Machines Without a Beating Heart?
As electric cars reshape the driving experience, enthusiasts wrestle with what makes a car special: the roar of its engine, the quirks of an aging machine, or the memories we leave behind the wheel.
FX Harsono revisits Indonesia’s unresolved past in Ambang/Threshold
The veteran artist reworks familiar images of violence and discrimination to confront a history that continues to shape the present.
Farewell, good breast
A cancer diagnosis brings more than the fear of illness. It raises difficult questions about how to protect those we love while revealing unexpected reserves of tenderness and resilience.
