Histories of Dignity:
A Collaboration Between Duke Undergraduate Researchers and the Friends of Geer Cemetery
Death, Burial, and Justice in the Americas (ICS 283) offers a unique window into Durham's history, African American history, and Duke students' engagement with our city through research into the lives of people buried at Geer Cemetery. An African American burial ground established in 1877, Geer Cemetery has been subjected to over a century of exclusion and structural neglect. It is now undergoing a community-led restoration process. On April 16th, 2020, as part of Duke Service-Learning's Making Place Matter series and the ongoing education work of the Friends of Geer Cemetery, students presented the life histories of the people buried at Geer Cemetery to over 100 people from all over the world on Zoom. “These were the citizens who made this city and a lot of prominent people are buried there. It’s really an honor to help bring these people back to the forefront,” says Debra Taylor, President of Friends of Geer Cemetery. On the service-learning element of the course, she adds:
“This is a partnership between both the community and the university. Even though both are their separate communities, we don't live in silos, we live together. So being engaged both from the inside and the outside is an absolutely wonderful learning opportunity, a hands-on opportunity. We can learn so much from books, but we learn so much more through interaction.”
Duke students Molly Mendoza and Ruth Fetaw wrote about their experience in this course in the Duke Chronicle. Click on the image to read the article.
PHOTO CREDIT: Anîbal Martel, documentary photographer & storyteller. Click on the image to see more of Anibal's work.
Through research and hands-on work, students confront difficult memories from the past and explore ways to create justice from those memories. This photo shows a Durham Morning Herald obituary for Trinity College employee Aaron Turner (c.1846-1916).
Adam Rosenblatt (Associate Professor of the Practice at International Comparative Studies at Duke) and Debra Taylor (President of Friends of Geer Cemetery) joined forces to help students learn what it means to attack the dignity of the dead--and how to begin repairing those harms.
Students connect theory to practice by assisting Friends of Geer with reclamation efforts.
Death, Burial, and Justice (ICS 283) is a service-learning course that explores the phenomenon of necroviolence: attacks on the dignity, integrity, and memory of the dead. From the disappearance of political prisoners under right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America to the deaths at the US-Mexico border produced by border enforcement policies to the deaths of indigenous women in Canada, students examine how violence and social/political inequities continue from the past, to the present, and even into death. Closer to home, students researched injustices inflicted upon Geer Cemetery, a historic African American burial ground just a few miles from East campus where several people who have ties to the Duke family and Trinity College are buried. The class also visited Stagville State Historic site, a plantation where many people buried at Geer were once enslaved.
“It was very important to me that this course was not just about talking in the abstract about other people's pain and other people's deaths, but that we have some connection to our own surroundings,” says Adam Rosenblatt, who teaches the course.
Students collaborated with the Friends of Geer Cemetery on reclamation efforts to fulfill the service-learning requirement for the course—a 20-hour per semester commitment.
“What excites me about this work is that it’s engaged and participatory. Working with cemeteries is an extremely tactile and accessible way of becoming involved with our public spaces and the stories they tell,” Rosenblatt told Duke Today.
Debra Taylor, President of Friends of Geer Cemetery, taught the students how to conduct genealogy research and facilitated field trips to the cemetery, leading to a deeper understanding of class concepts:
“Not only will the students learn about the cemetery, they learn about Durham, they learn about themselves as people, they learn how they interact with people. They learn that some of these inequalities happened in the past, some happen today, and there's always a way to go past them,” she says.
“One of the things I want to share with students is that you can do good work but also be in touch with what makes you joyful and what connects you to others,” says Rosenblatt. “I go to Friends of Geer meetings partly from that service ethic of wanting to help out, but I also go because now these people are my friends. Being in my hiking boots outdoors, looking for headstones and talking to people contributes to my own wellness. And I firmly believe that getting students outside, helping them build relationships outside of Duke is also something that contributes to their wellness and their sense of hope and possibility.”