Cemetery Citizens

Across the United States, groups of grassroots volunteers gather in overgrown, institutionally 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 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. The cemeteries in this book are not only sites for preserving undervalued pasts; they are also urgent places of political struggle and radical imagination. 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. Rosenblatt asks what kinds of belonging draw people to this work, who considers themselves a descendant, and what kind of public space a marginalized cemetery can become. Ultimately, he 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.