A White man's awakening
On this last day of Black History Month, I feel moved to share my own realization of how Blacks were purposely left out of local histories.
I am a white man, raised in the North, who moved to a rural county in Tennessee only 5 years ago. I wound up becoming the caretaker for what I believe is a 140 year-old Black cemetery. There are very few engraved stone markers, especially for the older graves. I know from the research I have done, and from speaking with some of the older Black residents of the town, that many of the individuals buried there were former slaves (a nearby iron mill had nearly 400 slaves in 1860).
My research is mostly confined to going through death certificates to try to identify who is buried in this cemetery -- but the death certificates often neglect to state the place of burial. If it were a cemetery of Whites, I could look up obituaries in local newspapers. But, prior to the 1970's, the local newspapers completely ignored the Black citizens, unless it was to report a murder or robbery committed BY a Black. Larger cities in the South had Black-owned newspapers, but for small towns, the Black population was completely invisible as far as their newspapers were concerned.
While Black History Month was started to try to educate our society about the contributions of African Americans to the Sciences and the Arts, no number of History Months will give Black families the histories of their ancestors that were stolen from them.
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Once, the A.A. population was 30 percent. But over the years many blacks left. Today there is only a small handful of families -- mostly just the older ones left.
Our county was apparently one of the last to desegregate the schools. There is a one-room schoolhouse still on the property of the cemetery that was used for grades 1-8 until 1965. The county never provided a high school for Black students.
Myself and a couple of neighbors have been working at restoring the schoolhouse. Thought you might like to see it.
I hadn't seen that reference to 'perpetuity' in a will regarding slaves. 
One obstacle I keep finding in trying to trace a family after slavery, is that immediately after the war they will use the last name of their enslaver, but will later choose their OWN last name.
They are all over EVERYWHERE. North, South, East, West.
Black people could not be buried with white people. Segregated at birth, segregated in life, segregated at death.
There was a whole production in NYC to get one designated as a National Monument (better look at the National Park Service website for it it now before it is banned - a link on the below page has already been censored and removed) -
For a century, from the 1690s to the 1790s, a small plot of land in Lower Manhattan became the final resting place for over 15,000 free and enslaved Africans. The burial ground was then lost under years of urban development and landfill, until workers rediscovered the burial ground in 1991 during an excavation of the land for a Federal Government office building. Excavations at the site revealed the remains of 419 Africans and over 500 individual artifacts. Considered one of the most important archeological finds of the 20th century, the African Burial Ground is of national significance because of what it can tell us about the lives of Africans and African Americans in an urban context. Both the deceased and their possessions help piece together a more complete history of New York City in the 17th and 18th centuries and what life was like for Africans in the city. The discoveries demonstrate the power of collaboration between anthropology, archaeology, and history.
(snip)
More: African Burial Ground
It took 15 years from discovery to fighting with GSA to finally completing and opening the Monument.
