When I was in high school my family and I started volunteering at East End Cemetery, a historically Black cemetery on the border of Richmond and Henrico County in Virginia. East End Cemetery was founded in 1897 and abandoned in the 1970’s due to bankruptcy. It was not until the summer of 2013 when efforts to restore East End Cemetery, and its neighboring Evergreen Cemetery, began in full force.
The Friends of East End are a group of volunteers who cleaned up the cemetery every weekend and started an oral history project to document the stories of descendants. Brian Palmer is one of the founding members of The Friends of East End along with his wife Erin Hollaway-Palmer. As a photojournalist, he documented the restoration of East End Cemetery over the years and published a book with Erin documenting their work entitled The Afterlife of Jim Crow: East End and Evergreen Cemeteries in Photography. In 2019 he won a Peabody for Reveal radio story “Monumental Lies” with his collaborator Seth Wessler. I interviewed him in spring 2020 for a digital journalism class I was taking at the time.
Brian Palmer is currently a professor of journalism at Columbia University while still working with The Friends of East End with their current restoration project at Woodland Cemetery. He is also a big fan of rootbeer and his dog Teacake.
East End Cemetery:
Website: https://eastendcemeteryrva.com/
Instagram: @eastendcemeteryrva
Friends of East End
Website: https://friendsofeastend.com/
Instagram: @friendsofeastend
Sara Schmieder 