Adam Rosenblatt presents CEMETERY CITIZENS, with Debra Taylor Gonzalez-Garcia, at Flyleaf Books

Join us for a conversation between Rosenblatt and Debra Taylor Gonzalez-Garcia, president of the local organization Friends of Geer Cemetery. In association with the Durham Black Burial Grounds Collaboratory.

Across the United States, groups of grassroots volunteers gather in overgrown, systemically neglected cemeteries. As they rake, clean headstones, and research silenced histories, they offer care to individuals who were denied basic rights and forms of belonging in life and in death. Cemetery Citizens is the first book-length study of this emerging form of social justice work. It focuses on how racial disparities shape the fates of the dead, and asks what kinds of repair are still possible. Drawing on interviews, activist anthropology, poems, and drawings, Adam Rosenblatt takes us to gravesite reclamation efforts in three prominent American cities.

Cemetery Citizens dives into the ethical quandaries and practical complexities of cemetery reclamation, showing how volunteers build community across social boundaries, craft new ideas about citizenship and ancestry, and expose injustices that would otherwise be suppressed. Ultimately, Rosenblatt argues that an ethic of reclamation must honor the presence of the dead–treating them as fellow cemetery citizens who share our histories, landscapes, and need for care.

Adam Rosenblatt is Associate Professor of the Practice in International Comparative Studies and Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and the author of Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science After Atrocity (2015) and Cemetery Citizens: Reclaiming Buried Pasts and Working for Justice in American Burial Grounds (2024). He is a co-founder of the Durham Black Burial Grounds Collaboratory and board member of the Friends of Geer Cemetery. He is also a comics creator and recent graduate of the year-long intensive program at the Sequential Artists Workshop, currently conducting interviews of independent comics creators in Durham and the Triangle.

Debra Taylor Gonzalez-Garcia is a passionate genealogist. She has worked on her family’s genealogy for over thirty years. As president of the Friends of Geer Cemetery, Debra has been instrumental in the reformation of the organization since 2019. She has researched and developed numerous life stories about the people within the cemetery. In addition to Friends of Geer Cemetery, she has been involved with the preservation of other cemeteries and the organization of the African American Cemetery Coalition to unite other groups with the same mission. She is also a board member of Preservation Durham serving as Vice-President.