EAST END CEMETERY
Site Brief:
Founded: 1897
Location: Richmond, VA
Additional name(s): Greenwood Cemetery
Affiliate group(s):
Friends of East End Cemetery
History:
Founded in 1897, East End Cemetery is the final resting place of an estimated 15,000 African Americans, among them some of the most prominent Black Richmonders of the turn of the 20th century. The cemetery was established the year after the U.S. Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, affirmed the constitutionality of racial segregation, which followed African Americans to the grave.
Even as Jim Crow laws proliferated across the South, Black Virginians continued to build and nurture their communities and their institutions while fighting to participate in broader civic life. In the decades following the Civil War, they created churches, schools, businesses, social clubs, mutual aid societies. Evidence of these is everywhere at East End.
