Bethel Burying Ground Memorial, The City of Philadelphia and the Bethel Burying Ground Historic Site Memorial Commission

I am feeling so honored and lifted to be entrusted with creating a memorial at Bethel Burying Ground. In 1810 Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church bought a plot of land where his church members and the community could be buried with dignity. Blacks couldn’t be buried in white church cemeteries and were relegated to the potter’s field. In my memorial I want to create a beautiful, honorific and generative space that once again reminds folks that this land is sacred—this is a cemetery where more than 5,000 Africans have been laid to rest.

There will be several components to the memorial including an ornate, 19th-century style cemetery entrance gate that uses Sankofa symbols (“Go back and get it”) in its design. White granite and concrete pavers will cover the surface of the cemetery footprint, engraved with inscriptions of the biographies of those interred. Other pavers will be treated with a special coating that allows the inscriptions to become visible only in humid or wet weather. The reported weather conditions on the day of death will be noted in the inscriptions. I hope that invoking the weather—something that provides a through line from then to now—also provides in this memorial a through line for connecting the dead to us, the living.

Several pavers will remain blank, representing the interred who have not been identified and whose stories have not yet been brought to light.

I will create a brick pathway that will follow the known footprint of the cemetery. In a sense this act is an unburying and raising of the 19th century brick cemetery wall. I will also install planters reminiscent of cradle graves and that became popular in cemeteries in the 1800s.