How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

Across the street from Blandford Cemetery, a smaller, more understated burial ground stood. The People’s Memorial Cemetery was purchased by twenty-eight members of Petersburg’s free Black community in 1840. Buried on this land are enslaved people, an anti-slavery writer whose burial site is recorded among the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom sites; Black veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II; as well as hundreds of other Black Petersburg residents. The contrast between the two was conspicuous in ways not dissimilar to that between the two cemeteries at Monticello. There were far fewer tombstones at the People’s Memorial Cemetery than at Blandford, and those there were indiscriminately scattered across the brown grass. There were no flags ornamenting the graves. There were no hourly tours available for people to remember the dead. There was history, but also silence.