Descendants Violet Jones and William Hart at Caledon State Park with Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (August 2021)
Join us on Sunday, October 10th at 11:00am EDT for a virtual program about the Columbian Harmony Cemetery and current efforts to repatriate its headstones that were desecrated and displaced in the 1960s. Panelists include family members of individuals laid to rest there and the nonprofit group History, Arts, and Science Action Network (HASAN), who are currently working together to right this historical wrong.
Established in the DC neighborhood of Brentwood in 1859, the Columbian Harmony Cemetery was one of the most prestigious African American cemeteries in the country. Over the course of a century, it became the final resting place for 37,000 individuals. In 1958, the Cemetery was sold to a real estate investor with the condition he would relocate these individuals to the National Harmony Memorial Park in Maryland. However, the headstones were not relocated and instead either sold or gave them away for erosion control along the Potomac River.
In 2016, Senator Richard Stuart and his wife, Lisa, discovered some of these headstones along their property next to the river in King George County, Virginia. Since then, HASAN has been working closely with the Sons and Daughters of Harmony Cemetery, to recover headstones and memorialize the stories of those they belong to in an initiative titled “Project Harmony.” Today the land where the Cemetery was once found is now the location of the Rhode Island-Brentwood Metro Station along with other commercial and residential development.
The panel will explore the Descendants’ experience with the Cemetery, from 1960-2019; what the Harmony Cemetery Project’s restorative justice is beginning to produce for Descendants; and what the Descendants hope the project will provide them and the community in the future, once its memorialization and repatriation is complete.
History, Arts, and Science Action Network (HASAN)
HASAN was established by Dr. Kelley Fanto Deetz and Justin Fornal in 2018, as a non-profit 501(c)(3), dedicated to restorative justice through racial reconciliation and repatriation of human and cultural remains. Their work documents and preserves history and cultures through bridging STEM and the ARTS to intact restorative justice across the globe. In doing this, HASAN aims to provide a highly interdisciplinary approach to exploration and preservation of cultural heritage throughout the world.
Founded in 2020, Sons and Daughters of Harmony Cemetery has been working hard with the help of their members and volunteers to deliver restorative justice, and if possible, headstones to the families whose ancestors were members of the Columbian Harmony Society founded in 1824. Their work is dedicated to funding and delivering an honorable living memorial wall at the site where the headstones were dumped as rip rap in the 1960s, returning in tact head stones to a memorial park near the site where their bodies are interred, and to inspire new generations of Virginia, DC, and Maryland youth by the example of the lives of these heroic Liberation Community members in DC, many of whom made significant contributions to American life with import reaching to the present day.
This program is free & open to the public. It will also be streamed live to DCPL’s Facebook page.
The post Otherness to Oneness: Restoring Justice at DC’s Former Harmonian Cemetery Together (Webinar) appeared first on DC Preservation League.
