![]() This shift marked the beginning of the period of municipal neglect that continues today. Holt became an almost exclusively Black space in the 1960s, when the city moved the coroner’s burials elsewhere, leaving it to be used primarily by low-income Black families in the surrounding area. Buddy Bolden, the legendary jazz cornetist who spent the last decades of his life in treatment for schizophrenia at the Louisiana State Insane Asylum, was buried at the cemetery in an unmarked grave. Some were patients at local psychiatric hospitals whose bodies were unclaimed after their deaths. In 1879, Holt Cemetery was established to take its place.įor the first 80 or so years of its existence, Holt was mostly used by the city coroner to bury unidentified or indigent people. Locust Grove-the city’s original potter’s field-was soon overwhelmed with bodies to bury and declared full. In 1878, the myth became a justification for forcing Black people to perform essential labor while much of the rest of New Orleans remained safely quarantined. This myth was originally used by slave owners as a defense of slavery because Black people were immune to yellow fever, it was said, God had intended them to be slaves to carry out essential labor under dangerous conditions. This was in part because of disparities in access to health care, but the high toll also had another insidious cause: a racist myth, propagated by white doctors, that Black people possessed a genetic immunity to the disease. Those who remained faced the brunt of the disease.īlack people, especially in low-income communities, were disproportionately affected. Early in the summer of 1878, as news spread of yellow fever’s return, the city’s wealthier residents fled in droves. The flow of ships in and out of New Orleans’s ports had always made it vulnerable to disease, and yellow fever had already decimated the city’s population many times, most notably in 1853, when tens of thousands are believed to have died. ![]() Holt Cemetery was founded on the heels of another public health crisis, the yellow fever epidemic of 1878. Many of these victims have been buried in Holt over the summer, the number of burials here roughly doubled. Black people in New Orleans have accounted for roughly 77 percent of deaths from the virus, despite making up only 60 percent of the city’s population. It has become the most-visited cemetery in New Orleans, as families try to protect the plots of their loved ones. Whenever a new burial needs to be made, Ernest digs up any grave that appears “untended.” If a family like Brady’s leaves the area for a brief period-as so many did after Hurricane Katrina in 2005-they may return to find that the graves of their ancestors have been dug up, with no documentation that they were ever there.ĭuring the Covid-19 pandemic, this reuse of graves in Holt has accelerated dramatically. The cemetery has been filled to capacity many times over each gravesite has been used for dozens of burials. According to Warren Ernest, who has been the primary gravedigger in the cemetery for 40 years, Holt is “one of the cheapest places in this world to bury a body.” For some of the city’s poorest residents, it is the only option, costing about 20 percent of the most affordable alternative. “They’re also a way of remembering, of etching these families’ stories into stone.” In Holt, though, memorials have no guarantee of permanence. “Burials aren’t just a way of giving dignity to the dead,” she says. Cemetery records and gravestones are central to her work. All of their graves have been lost.īrady is a genealogist, specializing in tracing the ancestries of Black families in New Orleans. Generations of Brady’s ancestors are buried in this place, though she doesn’t know where. Many sites are scrupulously well tended, freshly adorned with flowers and photographs others would hardly be recognizable as graves were it not for the bones that occasionally surface out of the loosely packed dirt. Unlike in most New Orleans cemeteries, burials here are belowground, in shallow, unnumbered plots that flood with nearly every rain. There are thousands of gravesites in Holt, squeezed together in haphazard rows wherever space allows. She winds her way slowly through the walled-off seven-acre lot, making a circuit of the graves along a narrow, paved path. When Gaynell Brady goes to Holt Cemetery, a historically Black burial ground here in New Orleans, she doesn’t visit any particular grave.
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