Holt Cemetery

Holt Cemetery was never formally designated as racially segregated, but after the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, legal restrictions on racial mixing in life and death were enforced more rigorously in New Orleans. In the decades after 1900, it chiefly served the city's African-American and Protestant population, though throughout the twentieth century some people racially designated as white were also interred there. Although often regarded as a potter's field or pauper's cemetery, many family plots have been lovingly maintained there for several generations. It remained in use throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, with interment often costing little more than the price of hiring grave diggers. In the decades following World War II, the city sometimes neglected the cemetery, but the many different styles of grave markings show how families protected their plots and memorialized loved ones despite that neglect. Holt Cemetery is also known as the final resting place of cornetist Buddy Bolden, born in 1877 and died in 1931, who is considered one of the originators of New Orleans jazz; although his grave is unmarked, a monument to his memory stands in the cemetery. What may appear at first glance to be disorder is also part of a rich tradition of African-American visual culture in burial practices, with parallels across the American South, the Caribbean, and West and Central Africa.

New Orleans, Louisiana · United States