There are three acres of lush greenery tucked away uphill at the intersection of 27th and Q Street. But this isn’t just a forgotten path of city parkland. It’s home to the UNESCO-designated Mt. Zion and Female Union Band Society Cemeteries, just as much a place for the living as it is a place for the dead. I had the opportunity to interview Lisa Fager, executive director of the Black Georgetown Foundation, a non-profit responsible for preserving the cemeteries. Black Georgetown is front and center in the effort to empower two of the oldest Black burial grounds in the district by community-building, policy, and advocacy.
“My path is a non-traditional path into preservation,” Fager says. Joining in 2019, it didn’t seem like her background in consulting would spell a future in history, museums, or archives. “I was able to utilize all my skills in marketing, communications, policy and advocacy all in one place. The people are so important and that’s why I stay.”
Black Georgetown’s newsletter shows just a glimpse of what Fager and her colleagues have to navigate. Environmental and geological issues need addressing with the city, which becomes a problem in itself.
“Before we even begin work, we have to do reports,” Fager says, “they did their own reports and found out that they have been responsible for flooding the cemetery for a hundred years and directing it off of Q Street.” When the cemeteries were part of the FY 2023 infrastructure budget (work didn’t start until 2026), Fager had to be persistent. “It’s me every two, three months like, ‘What’s going on? What are we at? Where are we at? Who can we call?’ Tying in city council people, tying in people even broader from other states because we’re D.C., right? We need some different types of help.”
Fager has done work with national Black civil rights organizations and with media companies, but it’s still a continuous battle for the local effort. “States like Virginia and Maryland have redirected funding to help Black cemeteries,” she says. “But where was the advocacy for D.C. cemeteries? There are only four of us, you know? And so how can we keep this around?”
Being “on city agencies’ necks” is the key to turning the tides, according to Fager. Righting wrongs that have been blurring across the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries require a deep network of volunteers and community support. Because the cemetery predates death records by over 70 years, Black Georgetown’s online resources like the Cemetery Information System (CIS) have helped in building a deeper, genealogical connection with D.C. and DMV residents.
“Everybody’s like, ‘Do you have family members that come?’ Well, our family member is usually the mother or father of the last family member most family members can name. So, we’re reintroducing people to family. We’re reconnecting.” Working with the public to research, the CIS has accounted for about 4,500 names across 150 years. Many records have been lost to fires in the 1800s.
Social media has played a role in piquing the general public’s interest and support. “People are like, ‘I go to Georgetown all the time, I’ve never seen a cemetery there,” Fager says. History influencers and so-called “cemetery influencers” wind up on Washingtonian’s feeds and algorithms. It’s new territory, but Fager is already on the pulse. “I’m coming into preservation really as a layman, but I love to learn…I am always looking to the next person who has been doing this forever. And so, I am open to old and new technologies.”
At the cemetery parkland, Juneteenth commemorations are planned for next week and summer is in full swing. Fager hopes that visitors can come see the park and support the Black history that D.C. has to offer.
“D.C. history is everywhere,” Fager says, “Frederick Douglass House, Carter G. Woodson, Mary MacLeod Bethune. You have the Civil War Museum, of course you know the Smithsonian, that’s a go-to. Anacostia Museum is great for local D.C. history.” These museums re-center Black history in the story of D.C.
“We should give these places an opportunity to tell the full story…to visit these sites and have expectations to hear the full story,” she says, “that’s really what I feel the cemetery does now. Even the house beside us had people who were formerly enslaved that are now buried in the cemetery with headstones. So we can tell their story.”
Featured image/photo by Jimmy Woo on Unsplash.
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