Scenes at the Stakes: Black Cemetery Citizenship and Grave Matters at Palmetto Cemetery

Abstract

This capstone manuscript explores what it means to practice Black cemetery citizenship at burial grounds established informally through community care, yet burdened by the legacies of structural racism and systemic dispossession. Situated at Palmetto Cemetery, a historic African American burial ground in Columbia, South Carolina, this work moves beyond conventional preservation frameworks to center the radical care work descendants and community members perform to sustain memory, place, and responsibility. It traces the ongoing return of descendants to the cemetery and looks to better understand the threats and challenges impacting its perpetual care. Framed through a series of narrative scenes, it takes readers to the “stakes”—to the physical, emotional, and cultural ground where the living stand in relation to the dead, confronting what has been lost, what remains, and what must be reclaimed.

Building on the theoretical lineages of the break (Moten) and the wake (Sharpe), this work reclaims the stake as the living tension between disappearance and reclamation, between flight and return. A Black cemetery citizenship praxis emerges as a revisionary practice that illuminates the stakes, holding ground, linking generations, and refusing cultural loss—not simply to fix the past, but to create space for Black cultural life to come. Through descendant interviews, fieldwork, and personal narrative, it calls attention to the grave matters that surface when Black burial grounds are treated as invisible and argues for descendant-defined practices of care as a form of truth, justice, and reconciliation practice.

By bringing the interdependent labors of descendants into conversation with Black studies, critical heritage, and cultural sustainability theory, this manuscript positions cemetery citizenship as a critical, regenerative practice—not only for tending the dead but for reclaiming Black presence, place, and futurity.