African American Deathways
Facilitated by: Kami Fletcher, PhD
Date: Sunday, April 21, 2024 | 10:00 am – 5:30 pm ET
Price: $250.00
Being Black in America has meant a continuous fight for freedom and humanity. Unfortunately, this fight and assertion of humanity does not stop with death. In this workshop, we will explore how white supremacy has sought to imprint upon death and dying by exploring the unnatural and disconcerting ways in which African Americans have died. In the same vein, we will examine the ways in which burial grounds and mourning patterns have particularly served as important vehicles for challenging postmortem racism and autonomous identity formation. Ultimately students will learn how African American deathways and death care have served as important spaces for collective memory and mainstays of self-preservation.
Facilitator
Dr. Kami Fletcher, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of American & African American History and Co-Coordinator of Women’s and Gender Studies at Albright College. She teaches courses that explore the African experience in America and unpacks social and cultural U.S. history at the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality. She serves as the Humanities Advisor for the PA Hallowed Ground Project and the past Historical Consultant for Mount Harmon Plantation (2017-2018) and John Dickinson Plantation (2021-2023).
In 2018, she co-founded CRDS and, since 2019, has served as President. Her research centers on African American burial grounds, late 19th/early 20th century Black female and male undertakers, and contemporary Black grief and mourning. She is the co-editor of Grave History: Death, Race, and Gender in Southern Cemeteries (University of Georgia Press, December 2023) and Till Death Do Us Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed (University Press of Mississippi, 2020). She has also authored articles and essays, which include the following: “Black Women Undertakers of the Early Twentieth Century Were Hidden in Plain Sight” and “Are Enslaved African Americans Buried at Mount Harmon Plantation? Space and Reflection for National Mourning and Memorializing”. Currently, Dr. Fletcher is working on the “Culture Keeper’s” Oral History Project funded by the National Science Foundation in collaboration with George Washington University. The project asks African American funeral service workers, the nation’s culture keepers, how rituals have been recreated, disrupted, reconceptualized, abandoned, and sustained during the pandemic. For more on Dr. Fletcher visit her website: www.kamifletcher.com, and/or contact her on Twitter using @kamifletcher36.