Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries by Ryan K. Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries by Ryan K. Smith Joy M. Giguere (bio) Keywords Cemeteries, Richmond, Virginia, Race, Historical memory Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries. By Ryan K. Smith. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Pp. 316. Paper, $34.95.) With the profusion of new publications on cemeteries and landscapes of memory, public monuments and memorials, patterns of care for and disposal of human remains, and historic preservation, it would be an under-statement to say that the study of American commemorative culture has flowered in recent years. Jeffrey Smith’s The Rural Cemetery Movement: Places of Paradox in Nineteenth Century America (Lanham, MD, 2017), James Cothran and Erica Danylchak’s Grave Landscapes: The Nineteenth-Century Rural Cemetery Movement (Columbia, SC, 2018), Thomas J. Brown’s Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2019), and Till Death Do Us Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed (Jackson, MS, 2020), edited by Allan Amanik and Kami Fletcher, are just a handful of new works that testify to the current recognition among historians of how the treatment and memorialization of the dead provide a deeper understanding of the social and cultural dynamics of the living over time and space. Ryan K. Smith’s Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries adds significantly to the depth of this recent explosion in public interest and scholarship by providing a focused study of cemeteries located in Richmond, Virginia. Examining roughly twenty burying grounds that Smith regards as “the largest or most instructive” (10) for understanding the social, religious, and racial dynamics of Richmond’s history, Death and Rebirth in a Southern City is as much a meditation on broader historical and contemporary trends concerning the creation, maintenance, and preservation of burying grounds in urban centers across the nation as it is a work of local history. Breaking with traditional patterns of cemetery-related scholarship that often focus on a single cemetery (or type of cemetery) or time period, Smith provides what could best be described as extended biographies of Richmond’s major burial sites, wherein he analyzes these spaces as reflections [End Page 710] of the values, power dynamics, and struggles of the living communities they served as much as they functioned as repositories for the dead. Addressed in eight thematic and roughly chronological chapters, these burying grounds include historically white spaces such as St. John’s Churchyard (est. 1741), Shockoe Hill Cemetery (est. 1822), and Hollywood Cemetery (est. 1847); African American spaces such as the African Burial Ground (est. 1700s), the Barton Heights Cemeteries (est. 1815), Evergreen Cemetery (est. 1891), and East End Cemetery (est. 1897); the Jewish Hebrew Cemetery (est. 1816) and Sir Moses Montefiore Cemetery (est. 1886); and cemeteries where both Black and white burials took place, such as the city-owned Oakwood Cemetery (est. 1854) and Richmond National Cemetery (est. 1866). Regarding the broad temporal parameters of his book, Smith explains in his introduction, “since general studies of cemeteries have rarely bridged their subjects’ origins with the dynamics of their modern preservation, this book attempts to forward a model here” (10). Smith thus provides a dynamic new framework for future cemetery scholarship, for by examining the deeper history of the creation and evolution of Richmond’s burying grounds, he is not just considering the changing patterns of care for and disposal of the dead or the evolution in cemetery aesthetics. Rather, by pushing his gaze to the present, Smith ably charts the history of urban development in Richmond and how this reflects the broader patterns of segregation and ongoing marginalization of the African American community despite the gains of the civil rights movement and burial desegregation in the late 1960s. Such patterns appear in stark relief with the historical trajectory of white burying grounds. Even in Smith’s chapter on Jewish cemeteries, he illustrates how, despite their religious distinctiveness and at times marginalization from the dominant Christian community, the ability of these cemeteries to withstand the forces of urban development and their survival as dynamic and useful spaces for the dead is a testament to how collective whiteness transcended...