Leaving toys on graves was once seen as a strange D.C. cemetery custom
, an account run by the foundation that is trying to restore and preserve the Mount Zion and Female Union Band Society cemeteries. The adjoining burial grounds, which, until recent years, were often described as one cemetery, served as the resting place for thousands of enslaved and free Black people. Exactly how many remains unknown. So, too, do the names of many of those people and the details about the lives they led.
Lisa Fager, who wrote the post, is the executive director of the Mount Zion-Female Union Band Society Historic Memorial Park foundation. She said the article doesn’t come up in a search of the cemetery’s name but was discovered by volunteer Erika Berg while she was researching historical African American cemeteries in Georgia. Versions of it were then found to have run in publications in places that include California, Kansas, Illinois, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Massachusetts.
Fager said she believes that leaving medicine and other items out could have also been connected with the Underground Railroad, because the cemetery served as a stop on it. “If you just thought Black folks were ‘peculiar’ leaving clothes, food, medicine outside for the dead, well that’s the game they would play with colonizers,” she said.
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