Till Death Keeps Us Apart: Segregated Cemeteries and Social Values in St. Louis, Missouri

This chapter uses St. Louis, Missouri’s Bellefontaine Cemetery as a case study to explore the contours of servitude before and after the Civil War by examination of cemeteries and burial patterns. It asserts that while cemeteries were segregated by both policy and practice, slavery blurred the lines of segregation when masters buried enslaved people on family lots and when free Blacks of social status sought burial alongside white counterparts. Using this unique research resource, it finds that urban enslaved people continued to live in masters’ households with their families, and that masters buried them as they had before the war, sometimes almost a decade after the Thirteenth Amendment passed.

Introduction

Till Death Do Us Part emerged from the 2014 OAH conference, which chose “Crossing Borders” as its theme, but has reflected over the course of its development upon seemingly new (and surprisingly dormant) divisions in American society. It takes as its subject the tendency among most Americans to separate their dead along communal lines rooted in race, faith, ethnicity, or social standing and asks what a deeper exploration of that phenomenon can tell us about American history more broadly. This introduction gives a brief outline of each chapter. Comparative in scope, and regionally diverse, chapters look to immigrants, communities of color, the colonized, the enslaved, rich and poor, and religious minorities as they laid their dead to rest in locales spanning the Northeast to the Spanish American Southwest.

“Death Is Not a Wedding”: The Cemetery as a Polish American Communal Experience

This chapter fills a void of study on Polish cemeteries in the United States while also following interethnic divisions within the Catholic Church. Comparing a wide array of Polish cemeteries in the United States and Poland, it highlights their role in ethnic and national affirmation and a fulfillment of religious law to bury apart. At the same time, it considers the limits of ethnic distinction as later generations experience upward mobility. Although Americans of Polish descent continued to bury in Polish grounds using linguistic and cultural symbols, their sense of integration led them to embrace broader funerary conventions and subsume distinctively Polish norms within larger Catholic and American practice.

“In the Grave We Are All Equal”: Northern New Mexican Burial Grounds in the Nineteenth Century

This chapter surveys death and burial in nineteenth-century New Mexico as the region transitioned from Spanish, to Mexican, to United States control. Highlighting Albuquerque and Santa Fe, it considers the territory’s multiracial and multicultural past by tracing Indian and Spanish burial practices, the influence of colonialism and independence, and ultimately the arrival of non-Catholic “Anglo,” African American, European, and Asian newcomers to transform the local burial landscape. Although earlier archival and archaeological evidence suggests that New Mexicans did not segregate their dead by race and ethnicity, subsequent imperial shifts, new concern over public health, evolving church influence, and religious and racial transformation led to new practices to separate the dead by faith, national origin, race, and economic standing.

An Ocean Apart: Chinese American Segregated Burials

As early as 1781 the Chinese began migrating to the American Pacific coast and those who passed away usually were buried in unmarked graves. Economic opportunities attracting more immigration in the nineteenth century coincided with the rise of labor unions and anti-Chinese movements. Riots against the Chinese and occupational hazards resulted in hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths. Since Confucianism dictated the rituals for funerals and burials for many Chinese Americans, the ideal between 1870 and the 1930s was to be buried across the Pacific in one’s home town or village. For those who remained in the United States, segregated cemeteries were established until the 1970s. Chinese traditions of grave offerings and reverence for ancestors in the spring and fall continued. Events between 1931 and 1970 stopped the repatriation of bones, but in recent years high cost of travel and cemeteries in China has increased the practice of exhuming remains and bringing them back across the Pacific for a final re-burial in the West.