Pitts, Toni V. Unmarked But Not Forgotten: African American Cemeteries in Southwest Virginia. 2026. Radford University, Thesis. Radford University Scholars' Repository.
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Abstract
Unmarked But Not Forgotten is a documentary photography project that examines African American, segregated, and formerly enslaved burial grounds in southwest Virginia and Central Appalachia as sites of memory, erasure, and resistance. Through landscape based photographic practice and historical research, the project reveals how slavery, segregation, and systemic racism remain embedded in the physical environment. Many of these cemeteries were denied proper maintenance, documentation, and legal recognition, causing graves to disappear beneath overgrowth, development, or neglect. Focusing on cemeteries in Montgomery and Floyd Counties, the work investigates how burial spaces function as primary historical documents that preserve evidence of racial exclusion, community formation and struggle for dignity after emancipation. These sacred sites challenge official histories that often omitted the life and death of Black Americans from the public record. Using a camera as both an archival tool and a witness, the project restores visibility to places rendered invisible through institutional neglect. The photographs depict these landscapes with reverence, emphasizing evidentiary traces such as fieldstones, depressions in the soil, and spatial segregation that persist in the countryside. Unmarked But Not Forgotten asks how photography and research can contribute to broader conversations on racial justice, historical memory and belonging. By confronting the normalized invisibility of African American cemeteries, the project insists that those buried there, though often unnamed, remain present in the landscape and in collective memory.
| Item Type: | Thesis |
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| Advisors Names: | UNSPECIFIED |
| Subjects: | N Fine Arts > NX Arts in general |
| Divisions: | Radford University > College of Visual and Performing Arts > Department of Art |
| Date Deposited: | 28 May 2026 12:15 |
| URI: | http://wagner.radford.edu/id/eprint/1341 |
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