[PAST EVENT] Sacred Space: Burial Places of the Enslaved and their Descendants

April 27, 2013
10am - 12:30pm
Location
Small Hall, Room 110
300 Ukrop Way
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location
The Remembering Slavery, Resistance and Freedom Project is excited to announce our upcoming lecture entitled Sacred Space: Burial Places of the Enslaved and their Descendants.

This lecture will discuss how cemeteries, as sacred memorial spaces, honor the lives of everyday people.

Funerary rites are a definitive characteristic of the human species. Slavery denied African Americans any right to proper burial, and the invisibility of innumerable burial sites of the enslaved today represents a continuing invisibility or erasure of expressions of their humanity. African Americans, however, have created and continued to reclaim sacred, ancestral space within the United States.

What did cemeteries mean to the enslaved and how do these cemeteries continue to resonate with African Americans?

Historian Dr. Cassandra Newby-Alexander (Norfolk State University) and archaeologist Dr. Lynn Rainville (Sweet Briar College) will present on cemeteries of the enslaved and their descendants. Dr. Grey Gundaker and Dr. Hollis Pruitt will lead a public discussion of slavery and sacred space in Virginia.
Contact

Shea Winsett, (757) 221-7681