Black people were buried all over Charleston…

The answer begins before there was a city to walk through. In 1670, English settlers established Charles Towne at Albemarle Point in West Ashley, and Black people were present in the colony from the beginning. The earliest Black burials were likely not in formal cemeteries, but near work sites, homes, plantations, and the first settlement landscape. Enslaved black people were often buried where they lived and died, with wooden markers, shells, plants, fieldstones, or no permanent marker at all. That is why the oldest Black burial map of Charleston is partly documentary and partly archaeological memory.

As the settlement moved to the peninsula, burial became tied to race, religion, class, and power in Charleston. White churches controlled most consecrated space, and Black people, enslaved and free, were often excluded from those churchyards. The old colonial public burial ground on the west side of the early town became the first major municipal burial landscape. By the early 1700s, officials complained that Black people were being placed in private lots and even buried in shallow graves in the streets because no proper burial ground had been provided. This was not a “custom” of burning people in the streets. The documented practice was to bury black people in shallow, hurried, often unmarked interments – including streets. Ultimately, this was a practice created as a result of exclusion, epidemic pressure, and poverty in Charleston.

In 1746, Charleston created a separate “Negro burying-ground” near the old public cemetery, roughly west of the original walled town. It was a segregated answer to a crisis the city had helped create. The ground received enslaved Africans and free people of African descent who were not welcome elsewhere. During epidemics, especially smallpox outbreaks, graves could be dangerously shallow. Officials later noted bodies buried less than two feet deep, not because the dead lacked ceremony, but because Black death was treated as a public problem to be disposed of quickly.

Black burial customs were still rich, intimate, and meaningful. African, Christian, and later Gullah Geechee traditions blended across generations. Some graves included clothing, shrouds, beads, buttons, shells, ceramics, or personal objects. Wakes, prayers, singing, night funerals, eastward orientation, and the use of shells or objects on graves reflected a belief that death was a crossing, not an ending. These customs survived even when the city denied Black families equal space, equal records, and equal markers.

The Anson Street African Burial Ground shows this clearly. Rediscovered in 2013 near the Gaillard Center, it held thirty-six people of African descent buried between the 1760s and 1790s. Archaeology showed careful rows, shrouds, clothing, and personal items. Scientific research found that some were born in West or West Central Africa and survived the Middle Passage. Their rediscovery proved that many Black people in Charleston were not lost because people forgot them; they were lost because development covered them and records failed to name them.

After the Revolution, the burial system shifted again. From 1794 to 1807, the public cemetery near Coming and Calhoun Streets, known as the Strangers and Negroes Public Burying Ground, received poor residents, enslaved people, free people of color, children, sailors, and captured Africans who died after reaching the port. It filled quickly. Then, from 1807 to 1841, the Cannonborough public cemetery served the same purpose in the area now associated with the medical district. Thousands of people of African descent were buried there. Much of modern Charleston rests over this hidden cemetery geography.

In 1841, Tower Hill became the next great public burial ground. Located west of President Street near what is now Harmon Field and Johnson Hagood Stadium, it received tens of thousands of the poor, enslaved, free Black, immigrant, orphaned, and unclaimed dead. The record suggests that the majority were people of African descent, including many infants and children. Tower Hill is one of the clearest examples of how Charleston built ordinary life over extraordinary loss.

Yet Black Charlestonians also built their own institutions of dignity. Free Black burial societies formed because white institutions denied them equal burial rights. The Brown Fellowship Society, founded in 1790, created one of the most important Black burial grounds on Pitt Street in Charleston. Other benevolent societies, including the Humane and Friendly, Friendly Union, Brotherly Association, and Christian Benevolent societies, created cemeteries in what became the Upper Peninsula Cemetery District. These were not only graveyards. They were insurance systems, social networks, statements of citizenship, and acts of resistance.

After emancipation, Black churches, family cemeteries, Gullah Geechee community grounds, and burial society cemeteries continued this work in Charleston. Public indigent burials later moved off the peninsula to West Ashley and then to Johns Island. Today, preservation groups are mapping Black burial grounds across the city, including active, abandoned, visible, and invisible sites. The answer to “where are they buried?” is everywhere: under streets, schools, stadiums, churches, neighborhoods, public housing, plantations, and surviving cemeteries. To study Black burials in Charleston is to see the city from below, where, like history itself, the story of Black burials in Charleston is interned in a very shallow grave.