Neglect of Black cemetery records functioned as an erasure of enslaved lives

Evidence

These were enslaved people and their descendants, so to me this was another example of the devaluing of Black life. The neglect of recordkeeping and recording was an erasure of their lives as if they did not exist. Denise was doing the necessary work of beginning to repair the harms caused by enslavement to these families. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 526

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the book’s central argument that archives were designed to prevent genealogical reconstruction; here, record neglect is another mechanism of erasure.