The Geer Cemetery: A Lesson in Black History – The Herald Sun

The Gate Keeper’s response: But why the focus can’t be put on both?

In a region inundated with debates over Confederate monuments, Black History Month invites us to refocus our attention to a largely unrecognized section of Durham known as the Geer Cemetery. Tucked away in the northeast corner of the Duke Park neighborhood, the 142-year old cemetery is slowly succumbing to the encroaching forest. More than 1,500 black people are buried there. Those everyday black men and women lived and worked and died in this place long before we arrived. Their labor built much of the world in which we now move. Many of them had no choice. Some were enslaved. Others were poor black people who worked segregated jobs during Jim Crow. All of them deserve to be remembered, and their final resting place deserves better than its current state of neglect.

Our landscape is filled with the names of elite white families. Members of these elite white families fought, even killed, to ensure that white and black remain separated and stratified. As we remember their contributions, let us also acknowledge that they perpetuated slavery and Jim Crow. They used the lives of human beings, both black and white, to build their wealth. And when that fortune was earned, a lot of people in those families simply packed up and moved away. Yet, we unflinchingly celebrate the landscape of statues and named-buildings they left in their wake. Today, some people argue that we must maintain those monuments; and that we must forgive the now-unthinkable historical white supremacy of our region’s forebears because of everything else they gave us. To do otherwise, we hear, would be to erase history, or to make elite white families disappear. (Read more)