Among the more than 70,000 buried at Oakland Cemetery, about 12,000 are African-American. The cemetery, a must-see for Civil War buffs, was segregated until 1963 and wasn't always welcoming to black Atlantans. But many of the African-Americans buried in the 48-acre cemetery helped create the foundation for what the city is today.
While Maynard Jackson may be the most well-known African-American buried at Oakland, the thousands also include doctors, educators and businessmen and women. "A lot of folks took off and went up north, but [these] stayed and built their legacies," said Thornton Kennedy, spokesman for the Historic Oakland Foundation. "These were people whose lives were upended by slavery and they chose to stay."
The Oakland Historic Foundation in conjunction with the National Trust for Historic Preservation recently launched a cell phone tour to highlight the cemetery's African-American section.
"Through this tour, we want to attract a wider audience. It's another way to capture an audience we maybe wouldn't capture," said David Moore, executive director of the Foundation. That is to say, an audience that is increasingly time pressed and technology driven, an audience that prefers a self-directed tour, an audience that may skew younger, or an audience that has an interest in the history of African-Americans in the city. While the grant for the project was specific to African Americans, in the future, the cemetery will consider expanding this type of tour to other sections. Other cemeteries across the country, including the Jewish Oakland Cemetery in Little Rock, Ark., and the Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, also offer cell phone tours.
The project was several years in the making, Moore said, beginning with a generous donation from a board member. Research on executing cell phone tours and on the individuals whose plots would be featured on the tour followed. Independent historian and Foundation board member, DL Henderson, added her expertise in developing and voicing the 12 stops on the tour, which she described as a sampler to stimulate interest in the cemetery history and even spur visitors to do research on their own.
The tour begins with Jacob McKinley, who came to Atlanta during the Civil War later establishing a business and co-founding South-View cemetery, created in 1886 for African-American burials (Oakland is sharing grant funding with South-View).
Henderson said she sought to include individuals whose gravesites were both accessible and interesting, such as the rosemary covered plot of Bishop Wesley John Gaines, a founder of Morris Brown College, or the grave of Dr. Thomas Slater, which features cement pillows as headstones, including a tiny one for his son who died before turning three.
Most memorable for Henderson, was the plot of Carrie Steele Logan, founder of the Carrie Steele Orphan Home (Now the Carrie Steele-Pitts Home). Just after Henderson completed recording the tour, the most recent executive director of the orphanage (and a former resident) Olivette Allison died. "When the stone was installed I thought, what a lovely legacy she has left for us," Henderson said. "I had to go back and re-record the tour."
In just a few weeks, the tour seems to be resonating with residents.
"It is already having extensions in the community and people are engaging in ways we didn't dictate," Henderson said. Recently, when students from the Atlanta Girls' School took a field trip to Oakland Cemetery, Henderson asked them to road test the tour.
"I thought, this is great – 16-year-old girls, they don't like anything," Henderson said.
But the fact that they were allowed to bring their cell phones on a school trip, got their interest, and the fact that they actually got to use them, held it.
"The teachers had the girls take pictures with their cell phones to go with their reports," Henderson said. "They were very eager."
Tour Tips:
Taking a cell phone tour may seem straightforward, but it is a cemetery and a certain measure of respect is in order. Check out the general rules posted at the visitor's center before taking the tour. Here are some specific tips to remember:
- It's okay to walk over a grave. The tour gives details about some of the headstones and you need to get up close to see them. You can even touch the headstones, just don't lean or sit on them.
- Photography is okay. Doing rubbings of the headstones is not.
- This is a cell phone tour which means the minutes you use do count. If you don't have unlimited minutes, you may want to hang up and re-dial between stops.
- Listen carefully to the directions that take you from one site on the tour to the next. If you need them repeated hit the "*"(asterisk or star) key.
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