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North Carolina A&T student project honors the forgotten dead in Maplewood Cemetery

A group of North Carolina A&T State University students has created interpretive benches to commemorate those buried in unmarked graves in Greensboro’s Maplewood Cemetery.

One bench is graced with 311 X’s, corresponding to the number of graves where African Americans are known to be buried, but no record exists of their names. 

Another is a two-sided seat. One side faces pristine graves, many adorned with flowers. The other seat appears aged and burned. It faces unmarked graves.

These are two of the eight benches created by North Carolina A&T students studying under landscape architect Steve Rasmussen Cancian. 

Cancian says Maplewood Cemetery connects to many parts of the city’s history, from its most discriminatory times to an era where people born into slavery became community leaders.

“There are at least five generations of Aggies buried there," he says. "But, you know, I wasn't even aware of it, nor were my colleagues. So there's a lot of connections to be built.”

Maplewood was established in 1918 to provide burial space for African-American families.

The benches will be unveiled during a ceremony next week.

 

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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