A decision to move the remains of hundreds African-American tenant farmers from a former Virginia tobacco plantation to a dedicated burial ground has elicited a range of emotions among the sharecroppers' descendants, the AP reports. Some worry about the implications of disturbing the graves of people who were exploited and enslaved. Others hope the remains can be identified and reburied with more respect than they were afforded in life. The mostly unidentified remains are being moved from a site that had been part of one of the nation's largest slave-owning operations, to make way for an industrial park.
Archaeologists have already started exhuming the approximately 275 plots, and some of the remains of tenant farmers and their families are already in a funeral home but will be moved to the new burial site about a mile away. Officials have been consulting with descendants about genetic testing on unidentified remains as well as designs for the new cemetery, including a memorial archway. "I don't think anybody would want their ancestors exhumed or moved," said Jeff Bennett, whose great-great-great grandfather was buried at the plantation. "But for them to give us a lot of say-so in the new cemetery ... I feel like (they're) really doing it in a dignified way, in a respectful way."
The site, Oak Hill, was part of a family empire that enslaved thousands of people across 45 plantations and farms in four states, according to The Hairstons, a 1999 book by Henry Wiencek that chronicles the Black and white families that share the Hairston name. Samuel Hairston, the plantation's owner, was reputedly the largest enslaver in the South. But the grand property has stood mostly empty and unused since sharecropping ended last century. The 1820s plantation house was destroyed by fire in 1988. Many who were enslaved at Oak Hill left after emancipation, Wiencek wrote. Those who remained as tenant farmers were often cheated of wages and faced crushing poverty and sometimes violence in the Jim Crow South.
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Another descendant, Cedric Hairston, is generally supportive of the project to move the graves, but he worries about the indignity of exhuming the graves of people who were brutalized as slaves and exploited as sharecroppers. "It just seems that 100 or so odd years after their death, there's still no rest," he said. Some tenant farmers took the Hairston surname, in part because "we had no other name to identify with, as the government was collecting data for the census," says Cedric. Read about more descendants here.
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