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North Burial Ground Presents: Dr. Kami Fletcher
February 23, 2022 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
North Burial Ground Presents: Dr. Kami Fletcher, virtual presentation, 6-7pm.
For more details and to RSVP: https://fb.me/e/1ztrdRYjx
NBG Presents is our monthly virtual series for folks who love cemeteries.
This month we want to welcome Dr. Kami Fletcher from Albright College.
Baltimore’s African Burying Ground and the Development of Mount Auburn Cemetery:
Nineteenth century African Americans fought for burial rights, which speaks to how these women and men wanted protection and an autonomous space to memorialize their dead. Autonomous Black burial grounds led to individual African Americans persons owning land and developing savvy business ventures. In Baltimore this led to the African Burying Ground, the first phase of Mount Auburn Cemetery. Pouring over 3,170 pages of microfilm at the Maryland State Archives, in my research I uncovered that Mount Auburn Cemetery went through four distinct phases, each time growing, developing, and changing with the needs of Black Baltimoreans and the collective Black Baltimore community. Please join me as I talk about how Baltimore’s African Burying Ground was founded by the seven Black trustees at Sharp Street (the first African Methodist Church in Baltimore whose roots that go back to 1787) established the African Burying Ground which developed into Mount Auburn Cemetery that still stands today.
Dr. Fletcher’s Bio:
Dr. Kami Fletcher is an Associate Professor of American & African American History and Co-Coordinator of Women’s and Gender Studies at Albright College. Her research centers on African American burial grounds, late 19th/early 20th century Black female and male undertakers, and contemporary Black grief and mourning. She is the co-editor of Till Death Do Us Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed which examines the internal and/or external drives among ethnic, religious, and racial groups to separate their dead (University Press of Mississippi, April 2020) She is currently working on Grave History: Death, Race & Gender in Southern Cemeteries from Antebellum to the Post-Civil Rights Era investigates the southern places where cemeteries take root as well as probe the interplay of southern history, culture, race, class, gender, and climate in these cities of the dead (University of Georgia Press).
For more on Dr. Fletcher visit her website: www.kamifletcher.weebly.com and/or contact her on Twitter using @kamifletcher36.
You can join the event using this link:
https://bit.ly/3oUp5Pp
If you’re not familiar with MS Teams and don’t already have it downloaded to your computer, select the second option: “Continue on this Browser” to access the presentation!