Outdoor Archives

We often think of cemeteries as separate worlds unto themselves. But those buried at Confederate graveyards were surely connected to those at the African burial grounds, and the cemetery reveals the intimacy of their connections. Ryan Smith says he and his students have been transformed by tending to cemeteries over the past 20 years. And: After Pearl Harbor, the United States Navy needed land for bases and training. Travis Harris says that the Magruder community was just one of many mostly black communities displaced for military bases. Later in the show: Brian Palmer grew up hearing about Magruder, his father’s boyhood neighborhood that was bulldozed to make way for a US Naval base. An old picture led him and his wife Erin Palmer back to Magruder and across the state tracking where his ancestor was enslaved. After moving to Richmond, the couple got involved in restoring a cemetery where Brian has more ancestors.