Cemetery Citizens: Reclaiming the Past and Working for Justice in American Burial Grounds

The Ancient Burying Ground Association presents Exploring Freedom, a Virtual Lecture Series to promote education and discussion. This series will illustrate how burying grounds can be a catalyst for social justice and how historians, genealogists, descendants, and volunteers can become empowered to reinterpret and honor the past. 

Presented by Adam Rosenblatt, PhD,  Professor, Duke University and Faculty Director, Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute

Across the United States, groups of grassroots volunteers gather in overgrown, systemically neglected cemeteries. As they rake, clean headstones, and research silenced histories, they offer care to individuals who were denied basic rights and forms of belonging in life and in death. Cemetery Citizens is the first book-length study of this emerging form of social justice work. It focuses on how racial disparities shape the fates of the dead, and asks what kinds of repairs are still possible. Drawing on interviews, activist anthropology, poems, and drawings, Adam Rosenblatt takes us to gravesite reclamation efforts in three prominent American cities. Cemetery Citizens dives into the ethical quandaries and practical complexities of cemetery reclamation, showing how volunteers build community across social boundaries, craft new ideas about citizenship and ancestry, and expose injustices that would otherwise be suppressed. Ultimately, Rosenblatt argues that an ethic of reclamation must honor the presence of the dead—treating them as fellow cemetery citizens who share our histories, landscapes, and need for care.

BIO: Adam Rosenblatt teaches International Comparative Studies and Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. In addition to his academic roles, he has worked at Physicians for Human Rights, the Human Rights Center of the University of Chile, and at the U.S.-Mexico Border.

An ethnographer and cartoonist interested in human rights, the ethics of care, and our ongoing ties to the dead, Rosenblatt is the author of Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science after Atrocity (Stanford University Press, 2015), a winner of Choice’s 2016 Outstanding Academic Title award. His second book, Cemetery Citizens: Reclaiming the Past and Working for Justice in American Burial Grounds (Stanford, 2024). In Durham, North Carolina, Rosenblatt works with the Friends of Geer Cemetery, teaches community-engaged courses, and is the co-founder of the Durham Black Burial Grounds Collaboratory.