The Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery Memorial of Alexandria, Virginia: A remembered, “forgotten,” and re‐remembered memory site

The Freedmen's Cemetery, as it was first named, was created in Alexandria, Virginia, by the US Army in 1864. It was created due to the large number of people who self-emancipated to Alexandria, Virginia, because it was under control of Union forces. Enslaved people sought the prospect of freedom behind Union lines due to US government "Contraband Policy" which was enacted in May 1861. This policy in the first months of the Civil War described enslaved people who escaped to Union controlled territories as "Contrabands of War" ("The History of Fort Monroe"), who could be a source of labor for the Union and would not be returned to their enslavers as was the earlier policy. Alexandria, Virginia, a stable territory for the US military starting in late May 1861, was a desirable location to try to reach for self-emancipation due to its stability and the potential for employment. While it is believed the majority of self-emancipating people who came to Alexandria were from nearby counties in Maryland and Virginia, some people are thought to have made their way to Alexandria from places further south. It is not known exactly how many African American refugees came to Alexandria during the Civil War, but the estimated number is between 10,000 (Ater, 2019, p. 221) and 20,000 (Sipe et al., 2014, p. 119). Over-crowding, insufficient food, and outbreaks of diphtheria, smallpox, and typhoid were factors causing the deaths of the Contrabands who made it to Alexandria (Ater, 2019, p. 221; Sipe et al., 2014, p. 502). Starting in 1862 and continuing until 1864 African American Contrabands were buried at Penny Hill, Alexandria's pauper cemetery, which was established by the City of Alexandria in 1796 and was nearly full by the time of the Civil War (Bah, 2022) ("Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery"). The increasing number of people arriving in Alexandria who were Contrabands, the conditions they had lived in under enslavement, and the poor living conditions in Alexandria resulted in large numbers of Contrabands dying (Sipe et al., 2014, p. 147). The lack of space in the already established cemetery (Ater, 2019, p. 222) made clear the US government needed to build a specific Contraband and African American cemetery. This followed the common practice of segregated cemeteries, a custom which was observed throughout much of the United States until the mid-twentieth century (Yalom, 2008, p. 29). The initial burials took place at the Contrabands and Freedmens Cemetery in 1864. Reverend Albert Gladwin was in charge of the cemetery. Gladwin was a minister who came to Alexandria, Virginia, through the American Baptist Free Mission Society (Ater, 2019, p. 222). His Book of Lists recorded the name of the person buried, the date of their burial and, if known, the person's address at time of their death and their cause of death. The Book of Lists provides information for all 5 years of the cemetery's operation. One problem with the Book of Lists is the lack of detail describing the specific location of any individual's burial, such as what row it was in or how far from the street it was located; instead, it is organized by date of burial (Sipe et al., 2014, p. 148). Randall Ward, a freedman who arrived in Alexandria in approximately 1862, worked as a gravedigger and was involved in the daily operation of the cemetery (Bah, 2022) ("Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery"). 52% of the burials at the cemetery were children of ages from newborn/stillborn to 10 years old (Sipe et al., 2014, p. 151). Graves locations were noted by wooden markers. Wooden grave markers were common in Virginia from the time of English colonization through the nineteenth century due to lack of useable stone (Yalom, 2008, p. 5). Wooden markers were also used at the second African burial ground in Richmond during its use from 1816 to 1879 (Smith, 2020, p. 26) and in nineteenth century African American burials in Surry County, Virginia (Johnson, 2004, 51, 56). After the Civil War, the cemetery and the land surrounding it were returned to its former owner, a person who had sided with the Confederacy. The cemetery is visible on maps throughout the late nineteenth century (Sipe et al., 2014, p. 160). Local people were involved with upkeep of the cemetery and its use as a memory site through the early twentieth century, even as a brick making yard was established next to the cemetery starting in the 1880s. A Washington Post article in 1894 reported that in digging clay for bricks, human remains of Contrabands were visible and being displaced (Sipe et al., 2014, p. 163). Starting in 1889, on the same street, a half mile north of the cemetery, a large Confederate statue erected by the United Confederate Veterans was displayed in the middle of an intersection (Sullivan, 2020). Two decades later, a plot of land which included the cemetery was given to a local Roman Catholic Bishop and the local archdiocese in 1917 (Sipe et al., 2014, pp. 165–166) (Figure 1). Source: Sipe et al., 2014. Over time, the fencing and wooden grave markers decayed and visible evidence which signified the cemetery disappeared. However, the site was not overgrown and was tended by family members of those buried there and by local community members. The Roman Catholic diocese owned the land until it was sold in 1946 and the area was rezoned by the City of Alexandria. The land had restrictions placed on it which prohibited the building of an automobile service station, an auto repair garage, or any establishment which sold alcohol for drinking (Sipe et al., 2014, p. 167). The last time the cemetery appeared on a map was 1948 ("Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery Memorial"). The land was sold several more times, and in 1955, the prohibitions on what businesses could be conducted on the land were rescinded. In 1956, a gas station opened on the land and in 1960, a two-story office building was constructed near the gas station (Sipe et al., 2014, p. 170). The construction for the gas station and its storage tanks, along with replacement storage tanks through the years, means that human remains were likely displaced during its construction, although none were ever reported (Sipe et al., 2014, p. 528). The CFCM shares with other sites an experience of attempts at erasure of slavery and enslaved people through active abrogation. Like Alexandria's Freedmen's Cemetery, the second African Burial Ground in Richmond was officially "forgotten" and no longer documented in Richmond city records starting in 1877 (Smith, 2020, p. 29). Both cemeteries were impacted by the construction of gas stations (2020, p. 17). And like Black cemeteries in Petersburg, Virginia; Baltimore, Maryland; Columbia, South Carolina; and Dallas, Texas, Richmond's and Alexandria's cemeteries were disturbed by road construction (2020, p. 31). The ways in which people remember the past is influenced by monuments and memorials (Lovelace, 2021, p. 132). Memorials shape both individual and collective national psyches (Moulton, 2021, p. 4). The CFCM is an example of what Moulton considers a living space and a living memory with the land being a monument itself (Moulton, 2021, p. 2). The Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery, as it is now called, was formally reincorporated into the City's history based on a research project in 1987 by the City of Alexandria's historian, T. Michael Miller, who found a reference to the cemetery in an 1894 Alexandria Gazette newspaper article ("Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery Memorial"). The cemetery was registered with the State of Virginia and the potential for impact by the construction of a bridge ramp for the new Wilson Bridge across the Potomac River was incorporated in the City's 1992 Master Plan (Sipe et al., 2014, p. 187). The Book of Lists, which is also known as The Gladwin Record, was published by Wesley E. Pippenger, an independent historian, in 1996 ("Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery Memorial"). Pressure from the community to confirm the existence of the cemetery led to a noninvasive archeological survey, using ground penetrating radar and electromagnetic studies, along with additional archival research (Sipe et al., 2014, p. 187). Likely grave shafts were detected and planning for future construction of the bridge ramp was halted so that additional research could be conducted (Sipe et al., 2014, p. 191). A community advocacy organization, Friends of Freedmen's Cemetery, was formed in 1997 by two activists, Lillie Finklea and Louise Massoud. The "s" in the name of the cemetery has been dropped in the current official title of the CFCM. The first of several cemetery rededications was held in 1998 ("Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery Memorial") and attended by community members as well as City officials. Because the cemetery would have been impacted by highway and bridge construction, two significant decisions were made by the Virginia Department of Historical Resources. One was a commemoration of the cemetery would be needed in any future project, and the other was additional archeological testing needed to be conducted. Test areas confirmed likely coffins along with nineteenth century artifacts (Sipe et al., 2014, p. 192, 197). In 2000, an official Virginia highway marker was dedicated at the location ("Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery Memorial"). In 2002, the Friends of the Freedmen's Cemetery, along with the City's Archaeological Commission and other activists, were able to obtain an agreement which planned for the demolition of the businesses on the site and the creation of the CFCM (Sipe et al., 2014, p. 212), as well as relocation of proposed highway and bridge ramp (Sipe et al., 2014, p. 524). Additional archeological and archival research was conducted from 2004 to 2013. Alexandria Archaeology, the urban archaeology program for the City of Alexandria, was involved in all parts of this process. During this time, City archeological staff worked with a private CRM (Cultural Resource Management) company to document the site (Ater, 2019, p. 223). It is important to note that no human remains were removed during the archeological work, as the reason for the excavations was to identify the burial locations. The site as a whole was not excavated. Instead, archaeological units were dug in different locations at the site. As much as possible, after initial removal of topsoil, excavations were done using hand trowels (Sipe et al., 2014, p. 213). Digging was conducted until an outline of a coffin was visible due to changes in the soil color, or until sterile soil was reached which included no evidence of artifacts or dirt disturbance (Sipe et al., 2014, p. 527). The purpose of the archaeological work from 2004 to 2013 was to ensure graves would not be disturbed in any construction of a memorial or during future work on the two streets which border the site (Sipe et al., 2014, p. 523, 527). Evidence of acts of memorialization was found above several grave sites. On top of several graves were a purposeful deposit of 78 oyster shells. These were located at the burials' original layer, indicating placement at or near the time of the burials, and were likely grave decorations. During the excavation, these oyster shells were documented but not removed from their in situ grave top locations (Sipe et al., 2014, pp. 501–502). As with the New York African burial ground (Perry et al., 2009, p. 354) earlier removal of soil above the burials in Alexandria during the twentieth century may have destroyed additional evidence of decorations on top of graves. Additional burials with shells or other goods placed on top of the graves may have once been present but removal of topsoil during road and building construction prior to the 1990s may have erased evidence of these funerary practices. The purposeful placement of 78 oyster shells over several graves at the time of the burials may be an act of transgenerational memory of African traditions. These shells were likely grave decorations (Sipe et al., pp. 501–502). Objects can be integral to the sharing of memories, including traumatic memory, across generations (Hirsch, 2008, p. 107, 108). In other eighteenth and nineteenth century African American cemeteries, shells and other objects such as broken ceramics are often found on top of graves (Jamieson, 1995, p. 51; Sipe et al., p. 80; Yalom, 2008, p. 15). Purposeful deposits of white objects on top of graves are also found in Guadeloupe and Haiti (Jamieson, 1995, p. 51). Folklorists in South Carolina in the late nineteenth century mention shells being placed on top of African American graves (1995, p. 50) and the WPA's Georgia Writer's Project included interviews with African Americans who kept the tradition of purposeful placement of objects on top of grave through the twentieth century (Yalom, 2008, p. 123). It is thought the tradition of placing objects on top of graves can be traced to Western African traditions (Sipe et al., 2014, p. 81), primarily the Bakango people from present day Democratic Republic of Congo near the Angola border (Yalom, 2008, p. 15). In a number of West African traditions, after death, the deceased travels to the afterworld through water. Shells may symbolize the water or may be houses for the soul (Sipe et al., p. 81) or be symbols of the dead's passage through water to the spirit world (Perry et al., 2009, p. 355; Yalom, 2008, p. 126). These shells may represent an act of decolonization by people at the time of the burials. The possible transgenerational aspect of this memorial act is significant when considering that the people who placed the shells were not likely to have firsthand knowledge of this tradition, as the importation of enslaved people from countries outside of the United States was formally banned after 1808 ("The Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves, 1808"). However, it is important to note that evidence of funeral rituals cannot be found in the archeological record (Seeman, 2010, p. 108). The purposeful addition of shells on top of a grave may have been an important cultural marker. Seeman argues that there have been too many vague attributions to African cultural practices by people who were enslaved or their recent descendants (Seeman, 2010, p. 102). Making a direct connection between burial practices of people who were enslaved, formerly enslaved, or recent descendants and African traditions is difficult for several reasons. People who were enslaved were stolen from a wide geographic area of West and West-Central Africa over an extended period of time (Jamieson, 1995, p. 43) making a unified African burial tradition unlikely. This is why we do not know the exact direct lineage of the practice of purposeful oyster shells from Western Africa or even if this is a practice unique to enslaved African Americans. While we do not know the full meaning of this burial practice in Alexandria or at other African American cemeteries, that does not diminish the significance of the act for those who took the time and effort to place these goods on top of specific coffins. In 2007, a rededication ceremony was held for the cemetery. The ceremony included government officials, African-style drummers, a poem by Alexandria's Poet Laureate, and the lighting of community-decorated bag luminaries. Each bag luminary represented a person buried at the cemetery, and included the person's name, sex, and age at death. The bags were decorated by students in the public schools, visitors to several City museums in the Office of Historic Alexandria, as well as members of a local Girl Scout Troop. The bags can be viewed on the City of Alexandria's CFCM webpage ("Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery Memorial"). Commemoration ceremonies are held every 5 years since the cemetery's official rededication. An open design competition for the creation of the CFCM was held in 2008. Alexandria architect C.J. Howard won the design competition. His design was used as the framework for the memorial ("Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery Memorial"). The final memorial design was created with input from the Friends of the Freedmen's Cemetery, members of the Archaeological Commission, along with other community members and City employees in several departments. While the Friends of the Freedmen's Cemetery included descendants of those buried at the site, other community members were part of that organization, and the organization as a whole contributed input on what the memorial should include. The Friends of the Freedmen's Cemetery had several elements which they wanted in the memorial design. These included a fence to mark the cemetery's location, the marking of graves, the names of the people buried at the site, and a map which included information that "desecration [had]… occurred on the site" (Sipe et al., p. 529). A form of decolonization incorporated in the CFCM was a listing of the names of people buried at the cemetery (Sipe et al., p. 529), which helped to bring the existence of the people who were interred at the site into the public sphere. On the list of names of those buried at the cemetery, there is an indication of those for whom a living descent has been found by Char Bar, a professional genealogist. The indication of those who have living descendants is a powerful example of decolonization, by showing resistance to being made invisible (Sharpe, 2016, p. 114) through the recognition that the families of those buried are still present (Figure 2). Additional elements were added to the CFCM. These included a public art sculpture titled "The Path of Thorns and Roses," which was chosen through a national search. The figures of the sculpture are meant to represent the journey to Alexandria of the Contrabands and freedmen. Several bas-relief panels were created by a local sculptor. The panels have quotes from two nineteenth century African Americans, Harriot Jacobs, an African American activist and formally enslaved women, and Emma Bynum, who arrived in Alexandria as a Contraband. The CFCM was formally dedicated a final time on September 6, 2014 ("Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery Memorial Construction"). Memorials designed to recognize loss or trauma often use narrative testimony as a way to give witness (Atkinson-Phillips, 2015, p. 11), such as with the Stolen Generations Memorial in Australia, acknowledging the abduction of Aboriginal children from their families by the Australian government (2015, p. 17). It is important to acknowledge and mark sites like the Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery because monuments and memorials express specific versions of history and influence the legitimacy of the history. A space/place commemoration becomes part of the assumed natural order (Lovelace, 2021, p. 131). Working against purposeful acts of forgetting is a form of anti-racist behavior, with the act of remembering an active and constructive technique (Moulton, 2021, p. 4). Sites such as CFCM may give the future generations a sense that the present community as a whole mourns the loss from these earlier deaths. It acts as a testament of horror and survival, in addition to offering a sense of hope and healing (2021, p. 6). There are number of ways to consider the CFCM. One perspective is the concept of "re-memory," a term used in Toni Morrison's "Beloved." In the novel characters use re-memory as a way to reconstruct their lives during enslavement (Blyn, 1998, p. 113) as characters try to avoid the painful memories of their life during that time (1998, p. 120). Re-memory is needed as it resists the purposeful national forgetting (Debian, 2021, p. 35) and connects the past to the present (2021, p. 34) both in fiction and in real life. Through the use of re-memory the past is merged with imagination (Udoette, 2023, p. 215). Re-memory can bring together the past and present and may be a way of healing both for individuals and for groups (2023, p. 207) through a reformation of the past (2023, p. 208). The CFCM, by centering of the names of the individuals buried there, charges visitors to consider those buried there as individuals who faced hardships given the time and place and not as anonymous members of monolithic groups, such as formerly enslaved people. Place and space are significant aspects of re-memory. Re-memory allows for a continuing chain of land maps, space and place (Debian, 2021, p. 34, 42). Black people in US history are often denied access to the landscape (Lovelace, 2021, p. 131). Re-memory is a form of ancestral memory which enables current generations to understand experiences and geographies by those who first used that place (2021, p. 134). The role of the CFCM as a space and place contradicts the idea that space and place are racialized white spaces and the norm (2021, p. 133). Black geographies are influenced by past history as well as modern practices of racism and resistance, and give insight to both slave and post slave endeavors in the United States (McKittrick, 2011, p. 947). Place/Space and erasure from it is an element which impacted the Contrabands Cemetery and many other Black spaces from earlier generations in the United States. Unlike other historic Black cemeteries, such as the African Burial Ground in Richmond, the Contrabands cemetery was not located in the African American neighborhood, which was referred in Richmond and many other cities as The Bottoms (Davis, 2018, p. 1). Instead, its location was determined by the US government during an ongoing war. Destruction of Black neighborhoods, spaces and places located in The Bottoms expanded in the 1950s and 1960s through urban renewal and the Federal Highway Act, with The Bottoms neighborhoods across the country erased for public infrastructure (Davis, 2018, p. 3) and "public good." Similarly, the existence of the Contrabands Cemetery was ignored starting in the 1950s for business interests and public roads. Places connected with marginalized groups are not recognized as occupied spaces but instead as land available for new use (2018, p. 5). Black spaces, such as the Contrabands Cemetery, are influenced by colonialism and dehumanization, but at the same time resistance and thoughts of the future (McKittrick, 2011, p. 946) as demonstrated by the purposeful placement of burial goods. It takes the practice of "wake work" (Sharp 14), looking beneath the turbulent surface, to confront the legacy of slavery as African American memory is submerged (Debian, 2021, p. 35) and in many cases buried under asphalt. What happened during the mid-twentieth century to the Contrabands Cemetery, in addition to the second African Burial Ground in Richmond and other sites, are examples of Black life and death being made invisible (Sharp, p. 114). When it was first established in 1864, the Contrabands Cemetery could be considered a site of colonization. The segregation of the cemetery, along with the living conditions of enslavement prior to a person's arrival in Alexandria, as well as the poor conditions the self-emancipated people lived in, were a result of the colonizing transatlantic slave trade and the later internal US slave trade. The "forgetting" of the cemetery in both governmental actions (maps and deeds of sale) and business actions (including construction), starting in the 1920s, was a continuation of the colonization of the site. The attempt at erasure of Black people's bodies, lives, and memories at the cemetery is an example of what Christina Sharpe calls a gap in the archives (2016, p. 12). Yet in this time of colonized "forgetting," family whose ancestors were buried at the cemetery, along with other community members, shared the memory of the cemetery through generations, and kept the location information alive through stories. While documentation and archeological work can give us some information about the lives and deaths of enslaved people, it also makes clear we do not have detailed information on the burial and funerary practices of people buried there. Since the late 1950s and early 1960s, the wider discussion of the Holocaust has helped bring into the public sphere awareness of other histories of victimization (Rothberg, 2009, p. 6), including the long-term effects of colonialism around the world, as well as racial segregation, racism, and resistance (2009, p. 112, 175). Originally, decolonization meant to be free from colonial status. Over time, decolonization's meaning has expanded to include the cultural, economic, political, and psychological experiences (Betts, 2012, p. 23) for Indigenous and colonized people and their descendants. The community push for the creation of the CFCM occurred in the 1990s, at the time when the concepts of decolonization were becoming a larger academic and cultural force (2012, p. 33). The interest in having the cemetery researched through archival and archeological methods was not only because of pressure from the descendants of people buried at the site, but also through a larger organization of people of different ethnicities, the Friends of the Freedmen's Cemetery, as well as members of the general public. The creation of the advocacy organization, Friends of the Freedmen's Cemetery, can be thought of as an action of decolonization. Because of racism and the lack of opportunities that resulted from it in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there are limited written or interview sources directly from people who were Contrabands and Freedmen. Careful urban archeology, engaged due to community interests, offered a way to document the lives of formerly enslaved people, while maintaining the active memory of those lives by not disturbing or exposing the physical remains of those buried at the site. It is interesting to note that the statue of the Confederate soldier which stood on the same road several blocks away was removed in June 2020 after the City of Alexandria was given permission from the state government in April 2020. The statue is currently in private storage held by The Daughters of the Confederacy. Over the last 40 years, memorials and museums have been created that tackle difficult subjects such as the Holocaust of World War II and the terrorist attacks in the US in the 1990s and 2000s. These sites offer a way to try to understand issues that humanity grapples with such as the unpredictability of life, evil, humans' ability to act selflessly, and an enduring sense of hope (Greenwald, 2023, p. 16). Memorials for loss or trauma can become forms of witness citizenship and help reclaim voices in larger national identity narratives (Atkinson-Phillips, 2015, p. 11). It is unlikely that a local government-funded memorial for formerly enslaved and free African Americans from the nineteenth century could have been created before the late-twentieth century. It is also possible that the local and state governments were aware of the initial negative public attention received by the African Burial Ground project in New York City, due to the US Government and New York authorities' failure in 1989–1991 to consider the interests of New York's African American population in that project (Sipe et al., p. 97). Community input, including from the Friends of the Freedmen's Cemetery, was included in the push for documentation and later recognition of the cemetery. The proposed construction of a bridge and highway ramp as part of a larger construction project enabled people to press for the un-erasure of African Americans from Alexandria's nineteenth and twentieth century history. There had been a gap in the archive of Alexandria's history of the experiences of people who were Contrabands and Freedmen. Now, with the CFCM, that gap in history has slightly closed. Similar experiences with reclaiming an officially "forgotten" nineteenth-century African American cemetery occurred in Love, Texas. The Love Cemetery was the site of public protracted litigation as descendants were denied their ownership of and access to the cemetery starting in the 1960s, leading to the cemetery's physical erasure through overgrowth of plants. In 2004, the cemetery was reconsecrated, and it is maintained and its story told through volunteers from different backgrounds (Yalom, 2008, p. 36). The decolonization process for sites continues as places of memory are built or rebuilt in locations throughout the United States. Memorial museums and memorials such as the CFCM can "affirm, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that hope is neither futile nor naive" (Greenwald, 2023, p. 15). There is an increase in the creation of memorials commemorating loss and/or trauma (Atkinson-Phillips, 2015, p. 11) and their presence helps integrate difficult history and often ignored voices into the larger public narrative (Figure 3). The author wishes to acknowledge that the land which the CFCM occupies and the larger Northern Virginia area is/was home to the Indigenous Doeg people and is part of a larger territory of Indigenous individuals and groups in Virginia and the Washington, DC area. The author thanks the anonymous reviewers for their input and the organizers and participants of the 2024 NEH Summer Institute "Towards a People's History of Landscape: Black and Indigenous Histories."