“Graveyards, Monuments, & Freedom Towns: Black Memory and the Communal Practice of Futures Otherwise at the African American Heritage Monument in Kendleton, TX”

After the 2018 discovery of ninety-five unmarked graves of Black convict laborers in Sugar Land, Texas, a process of re-membering began. The most prominent emergence is the African American Heritage Monument and Park—an Afro-futurist architectural feat and now one of the nation’s largest Black history sites. Situated on a Reconstruction-era Black cemetery in a Freedman’s town, integrating Ghanaian Adinkra symbolism, and structured to guide visitors into a pilgrimage-like practice which creolizes a “sankofa journey” with a “stations of the of cross” like contemplative encounter, Black religious history and Black religions are both recalled and enacted by the monument. This paper, AAHM’s lead historical researcher and drafter of interpretive installations, attempts to reflect on the communal processes through which this re-articulation of Black memory came to being and to trace the ways by which Black heritage funds an imagination of insurrectionary freedoms, thereby inaugurating the construction of futures otherwise.