Friend of East End: Brian Palmer

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.

Brian Palmer:

Website: https://www.brianpalmer.photos/

Instagram: @bxpnyc

Twitter: @bxpnyc

East End Cemetery:

Website: https://eastendcemeteryrva.com/

Instagram: @eastendcemeteryrva

Friends of East End

Website: https://friendsofeastend.com/

Instagram: @friendsofeastend

My First Podcast

I made my first podcast in the Fall of 2016. It was my first semester of undergrad at The College of William and I was taking a class called Museums and Identities. One of the projects required us to research a person or place important to the Revolutionary War and, if possible, a part of the 2015 musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda Hamilton. I chose to research John Laurens as he met all of the requirements and was an early supporter of abolition.

Listening back to this podcast years later is strange. I remember recording it in my dorm room with a cheap microphone line by line as I had no experience scripting content. With a pile of books on either side of me and way too many tabs open on my laptop I tried to piece together a compelling and informative story about John Laurens. If I remember correctly I think I got a cold about halfway through recording and tried so hard to make my voice sound like I wasn’t sick!

I also presented it on my 19th birthday and despite some of the audio repeating in parts, it was well-received. Yet over the years, I lost the original audio files when changing laptops and while pursuing podcasting further hadn’t really thought about my first one. Thanks to some digital archaeology in my personal email account I found the closest thing I have to a final edit of my first podcast. So here it is, fresh from the vault, my first podcast!

Hello World!

Hi I’m Sara Schmieder! I’m a project manager at a marketing agency and a Board Member at Large at the Bisexual Resource Center. I graduated from The College of William and Mary with honors in anthropology in 2020, and then in 2022, I graduated with a Master’s Degree in anthropology and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from Brandeis University. I’ve been online since I was a teenager, and my research centers around digital anthropology. Here are some fun facts about me:

  • I love art and make stained glass windows
  • I grew up in Richmond, Virginia
  • I love fiber arts and spend my free time knitting and crocheting
  • Playing video games and watching movies are my two favorite past times
  • I have a minor in linguistics and took all but one class for it with the same professor
  • In 2019, I performed an original poem about Furbys at a cafe’s open mic night
  • It is very rare to see me without earbuds in my ears and an iced coffee in my hand
  • I have a Substack called Sara and the Silver Screen where I write about movies and other media