Black people are intimately connected to their ancestors.
In our culture, as in many others, we revere our ancestors. Black folks, though, take it to a whole other level. Some call it ancestor worship. I don’t know if that’s accurate, but it’s pretty close. We feel a profound connection, and we honor them, not only as people, but also for their experiences, wisdom, and strength.
Our relationships are ongoing and intimate, even with ancestors who were gone long before we were born. We understand the lives of those who came before us, and that understanding informs our thoughts and actions. It’s not unusual to hear a Black person say the ancestors speak to them. Our family reunions include special time to venerate those who are no longer with us. We even have t-shirts and mugs that say things like “Dear Ancestors: I Understand the Assignment,” and “I Am My Ancestors' Wildest Dreams.”
It’s with that energy that descendants of the original Black residents of Kinderhook, with the help of friends and colleagues, have been working to clean and restore the Persons of Color Cemetery in Kinderhook.
Something that most people don’t know is that there was once a large and thriving Black population in Columbia County, mostly centered around Kinderhook. The first enslaved Africans arrived in this area in the late 17th century. In 1790 there were nearly 650 enslaved Black people living in Kinderhook. According to the census of that year, one quarter of all families in Kinderhook were enslavers; on average, each family held three to four people in bondage. Although New York State legally abolished enslavement in 1827, many people remained in legal involuntary servitude for decades after.
For more than 200 years, Black people cleared the land, built the homes, tended the farms, did domestic work, and performed every task associated with 18th and 19th century life in the Hudson Valley. For the most part, they lived in the same homes as their enslavers, and frequently attended church with them. After slavery was abolished, many Black families took the surnames of their former enslavers, and settled into their own homes, living side by side with white neighbors; as early as 1851, Black and white children in Kinderhook were attending school together. But the multi-racial society that Kinderhook had well into the 20th century has - much like the cemetery itself - long been forgotten.
No one knows why John Rogers, who lived in the “Burgoyne House,” bequeathed a quarter acre of his own land for “a cemetery for the people of colour of the said Town of Kinderhook, to be used for that purpose and none other.” We do know that as many as 500 people are buried in this small, sacred piece of land. In use only from about 1816 to 1860, and lost in the woods for many years after, the cemetery was reclaimed from the weeds beginning in the 1970s, with further restoration done around 2016. All of that work was done by concerned local citizens. Our work is a little different. Because, although these dearly departed were an integral part of the Kinderhook community, they are, more specifically, our people, our ancestors, our history.
And today, that feels more important than ever.
Because today, we live in a time when our own government is attempting to control, suppress, and even erase our history.
We’re watching the federal government sue a major city in order to take control of its history, to erase the existence of the nine people held enslaved by George Washington in Philadelphia. On a daily basis, books about our experiences and accomplishments are being removed from libraries; school curricula are being changed; and the advances made during the civil rights movement are disintegrating before our very eyes.
To be Black in America right now is to live with too many emotions, to breathe within a cloud of cognitive dissonance: to love our country even though it clearly does not love us back. We counteract those overwhelming feelings with the strength of our ancestors. We hear their voices as they tell us to proudly to hold tight to who we are and remember who we came from. Our job is to reclaim our history, to preserve it, to share it with the world, and to use it to help America be the country it proclaims to want to be.
We understand the assignment.
The Persons of Color Cemetery is a tiny plot of hallowed ground. It is a mass gravesite marked by only a handful of headstones. We will probably never know the names of all the people buried there. Whoever they were - enslaved, free, children, and old timers - they deserve respect. They deserve to be honored; they deserve to be known. So we, their descendants and our friends, clean the remaining markers, carefully probe the soil to find fallen headstones, and document whoever we can. We do it for the ancestors, and we do it for ourselves. And, perhaps more importantly, we do it for the whole community. Because a community that doesn’t know its true history is deprived of having a full and honest understanding of the world around us.
Lisa Fludd-Smith is co-Founder and Deputy Executive Director of the African American Archive of Columbia County. She is a lay historian and researcher whose focus is on pre-20th century Black history in Columbia County, NY. Inspired by the legacy of her own ancestors who lived in Kinderhook as early as the 1750s, she is passionate about sharing her knowledge of Black history and genealogy with the world.
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