Though I will always be of Wilson, I have lived in Atlanta for most of my adult life. It is very much “home” for me, too, and is a bottomless well of African-American culture and history that often informs the way I process research and works related to Black Wide-Awake and Lane Street Project.

I’ve recently begun visiting metro Atlanta’s historic African-American burial grounds. How have they weathered exploding population growth, shifting demographics, outmigration, land loss, and other pressures? The second in a series — Lincoln Cemetery, Atlanta, Fulton County.

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I spent the morning of July 4 not “celebrating,” but documenting the final resting places of Black Georgians. Open since 1925, Lincoln Cemetery holds more than 75,000 graves — from civil rights notables like Ralph David Abernathy, Hosea Williams, and Dorothy Lee Bolden to everyday folk like those lying beneath the lovely memorials below. The nearly two hundred photographs I took today will be uploaded to findagrave.com, the enormous online database of cemetery records and memorial information. Anyone anywhere in the world looking for a relative can search Findagrave, but they will only find what volunteers contribute.

Most of the markers in the section of Lincoln I walked were modern machine-cut headstones, but a few caught my eye.

Folk artist Eldren Bailey (1903-1987) produced untold thousands of these concrete grave markers for Black funeral homes in and around Atlanta. This simple version retains its whitewash.

Photographs by Lisa Y. Henderson, July 2025.