Alexandria’s Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery for Frieze

For Frieze’s 200th issue writers, artists and thinkers were asked to write “fan letters.” Mine is a corrective to history. It’s about the Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery in Alexandria, VA. It for decades as I was growing up was covered by a brick office block and Mobil gas station and of course centuries worth of white supremacy… You can read more here where I write: ‘Inside the cemetery, hundreds of names descend in chronological order, but time’s forward motion clearly does not signify progress here’

Aerial photograph showing the Contraband and Freedmen Cemetery, 1949–51. Courtesy: City of Alexandria, Virginia.