Earning the Right to Live through Death
21
Earning the Right to Live through Death: the African-American Funeral Home and the Civil Rights Movement
Candi K. Cann
www.candikcann.com
candi_cann@baylor.edu
A Brief History
A Brief History
Burying Grounds
Burying Grounds & Cemeteries
In pre-colonial and colonial United States, enslaved people were usually buried in unmarked graves and separately from whites. Segregation ensured that many of these burying grounds would be forgotten for hundreds of years or remain unmarked. Even today, many cemeteries remain segregated and mirror the disparities often found in the world of the living.
African Burying Ground
African Burying Ground
(Pre-Colonial)
Mulberry Row
Monticello
(Colonial)
Segregated Cemeteries
Segregated Cemeteries
(early 1800's on)
Greenwood Cemetery, Waco, TX
Desegregated in 2016
Burial
Societies
Burial Societies
Mother Bethel AME CHurch
Mother Bethel
Insurance
Insurance
The Business of Insurance
&
The African-American Market
Funeral DIrectors & Insurance
Funeral Directors
&
Insurance
Segregation: The Emergence of an African American Funeral Home
Segregation & The African American Funeral Home
Funeral Homes as
- Safe spaces
- Places to gather
- Makers of Identity
- Sources of Capital
- Recoverers of Dignity
- Centers of Resources
- Network Hubs
- Tradition Makers
- Community Helpers
- Service Leaders
- Promoters of Education
- Providers of Transportation
Chesnut Funeral Home
Gainesville, Florida
Chesnut Funeral Home
RS Lewis Funeral Home
Memphis, Tennessee
RS Lewis Funeral Home
Poole Funeral Home
Birmingham, Alabama
Poole Funeral Home
JF BELL Funeral Home
Charlottesville, Virginia
JF Bell Funeral Home
Funeral Homes & Civil Rights
Funeral Homes &
Civil Rights
In the Civil Rights Era, Funeral Homes
- Provided Transportation for Civil Rights Leaders (to protect them and keep them safe)
- Provided Transportation to and from Poll Booths so people could Vote
- Provided Chairs and Tables for Voter Registration in Predominantly Black Neighborhoods
- Provided Bail Bonds for Protestors who were jailed
- Provided Combinations, Rudimentary First Aid, and Oxygen to people who had no way to get to Hospitals (which had quotas on treating bodies of color due to Jim Crow Laws)
- Provided Sanctuary (money, food, shelter) in times of Crisis
- Provided Meeting Spaces for strategy meetings
- Provided Funeral services and comfort to the Community
Funeral Homes & Transportation
Funeral Homes & Community Resources
Funerals
Funerals were an opportunity to affirm black identity in a society that sought to erase it. They also brought the community together and provided a safe space for outrage regarding oppression.
Funerals in the CIvil Rights Era were OFTEN politically charged, and differing views emerged in death practices.
Some core issues such as integration in cemeteries, the corpse as protest, the corpse as sacred and private, the funeral as spectacle, the funeral as protest march emerged, and funeral directors were at the center of setting the stage and organizing the ceremonies in a very public eye and in an extremely dangerous time. While I have done research on many funerals, I've only listed a few here as examples.
Funerals
Chaney, Schwerner, & Goodman
Emmett Till
Malcom X
Martin Luther King Jr.
After the Civil Rights Era
US Rep. Harold Ford Sr.
(one of the three brothers)
Robert C. Henry
Springfield mayor
Black Lives Matter & The
Contemporary Funeral Home
Trayvon Martin
Black Bodies
Freddie Gray
Tokenism, Erasure & White-Washing:
The Whitening of Death Studies
- During the 1960s there were over 4,000 black funeral homes, and yet they have been written about in history as a token phenomenon and not a valuable and integral part of American Death Culture and History (Histories of Death from Mitford to Laderman write about the White experience as the dominant cultural experience; e.g.the aids epidemic had far more scholarship)
- The History of Death in the United States is written from a primarily white and protestant perspective (e.g. the NFDMA is generally mentioned as an aside rather than one of the major organizations representing the death industry) which erases the important contributions of the African American Funeral Home in the United States
- Important Details of racism and Death (Combinations, Segregated and unfair Insurance Policies, segregated Cemeteries, etc.) have been forgotten or minimized while contributions by African AMericans have been white-washed
Erasure: The Whitening of Death Studies
Many thanks to the Louisville Institute for their generous grant funding