Love Cemetery: Unburying the Secret History of Slaves
China Galland
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"Love Cemetery" is the story of one woman trying to come to terms with racism - on both personal and public levels. When China Galland visited her childhood hometown in east Texas, she learned of an unmarked cemetery for slaves - Love Cemetery. Her ensuing quest to reclaim the ground, to mark it, unearths racial wounds that have never completely healed. Research into county historical records and interviews with local residents in Harrison County - at one time the largest slave-owning county in Texas - led Galland to the discovery of Love Cemetery, an African-American communal burial ground that the local community had been locked out of for forty years. Research became activism as she helped organize a grassroots, interracial committee, made up of local religious leaders and lay people, to work on restoring community access to Love. The history of Love Cemetery is the history of slavery in the United States and the message is ultimately one of tremendous hope as members of both black and white communities come together to right an historical wrong.