Mount Zion and Female Union Band Society Cemeteries, Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Entrance to Mt. Zion and Female Union Band Cemetery (The Old Methodist Burying Ground)
Photo Credit: Brian Goldstein
Team names, titles, and institutions:
Libby Bischoff, Professor of History, University of Southern Maine
Colleen Carpenter, Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor of Environmental Studies, Carleton College
LaToya Gray-Sparks, Master of Urban and Regional Planning Candidate, Wilder School of Government at Virginia Commonwealth University
Brian Goldstein, Associate Professor, Department of Art and Art History, Swarthmore College
How do we tell a people’s history centering absence? Centering who and what are no longer there?
We think a lot about racism as the action/s of the living, but how might we also teach it as the history of the dead?
What happens to our sense of community identity when we include/engage the forgotten/neglected dead?
How can we undo and counter histories of erasure from the physical and cultural landscape (engaging multiple disciplinary perspectives and mapping)?
How does looking at the history of a cemetery and burial ground allow us to rethink the larger social, cultural, and economic history of a place?
This module introduces students to the Mount Zion and Female Union Band Cemeteries in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. These side-by-side cemeteries represent one of the earliest remaining Black burial sites in the District. Mount Zion began as the interracial Old Methodist burial ground in the early nineteenth century (becoming Mount Zion Cemetery in 1879, once under the supervision of the African American Mount Zion Methodist church); the Female Union Band Cemetery, begun by a mutual aid society for free Black women, opened in 1842. This site offers a specific and general history of Black cemeteries, their contemporary interpretation, and their continued endurance.
Module Format
Six 75-120 minute class meetings as an interdisciplinary seminar including site work
Intended for mid-level undergraduates (but designed to be flexible across levels)
Community/Student Impact
This site provides an especially tangible example of both the material resonance of racism in the built environment and the efforts of activists in the twentieth century and today to redress those histories. As a result, engagement with the cemetery can provide potential reciprocal benefits to the cemetery itself (including the organization that manages it) and those who spend time here.
Learning Objectives
Students will be prompted to think about and discuss how learning in various landscapes (in this case, historic cemeteries) allows individuals to ask different types of questions about the past, present, and future.
Students will learn to engage with and read and interpret landscape as a series of layers, a deep history that tells multiple stories about the people who have inhabited (and continue to inhabit) it.
Students will learn to think of a landscape across scales, from the ineffable/universal to the individual/material.
·Students will compare and contrast sites that are superficially similar but dramatically different upon close analysis—and what such comparisons can teach about landscape, race, and social class.
Students will learn to understand a place that raises questions they can take with them in their future exploration and interpretation of other sites (cemeteries are everywhere)
Students will engage with various modes of activist interventions for addressing landscape inequalities, including historic preservation, community programming, volunteerism, etc.
Syllabus Outline
The course follows a six-part structure that takes students from the heavenly to the material and from the intangible to the physically tangible. Along the way, students will learn a variety of disciplinary lenses relevant to critical landscape studies that offer different interpretations and perspectives on this single place. Site visits are integrated among discussion-focused days:
Class 1. Heavens. This class introduces the idea of the sacred and of sacred space, and connects those definitions/understandings to the role of memory and erasure in the construction of community identity.
Field Trip 1: Mt. Zion AME Church/Mt. Zion and Female Band Union Society Cemetery
Class 2. Earth. This class will examine the physical landscape and waterways of the cemetery sites and the immediately surrounding areas as a way to introduce different ways of knowing in regards to understanding the literal reading of topography as well as what lies beneath the visible landscape.
Class 3. Community. This class will examine the intersections of race, space, urban development and land valuation and the impact these various interventions have had on Mount Zion Cemetery.
Class 4/Field Trip 2: Individual. This class will bring the focus to the scale of the individual: the individual grave marker and the individuals who live here now: those buried on the site, and those who have advocated for its preservation into the future.
Field Trip 3: Comparing Landscapes—Oak Hill Cemetery (1849) and Mt. Zion and Female Union Band Cemetery
Key Activities
Story Mapping: Students will participate in a story mapping workshop in which they will learn best practices and methods to use for the purpose of countermapping and co-creating maps with community members.
Close Looking/Slow Looking: Students will observe a single gravestone for 30 minutes, ask a series of questions about the evidence they see, and then write a one-paragraph profile of the person represented there.
Module A Citation
Bischoff, L., C. Carpenter, L. Gray-Sparks, B. Goldstein. “Mount Zion and Female Union Band Society Cemeteries, Georgetown, Washington, D.C., Module A,” (Roberts, A., Way, T. Directors), 2022. Available from Part 1: Black & Indigenous Histories of the Nation's Capital, NEH Summer Institute for Higher Education Faculty, Retrieved on (date retrieved) website: https://www.apeopleslandscapehistory.org/syllabus-bank.