Oaks Cemetery is a historic African American cemetery in Fayetteville.
Preserving African American Cemeteries in Arkansas
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
6:30 p.m.
Online only (registration required)
Cost: free
Join us online during Black History Month in our Not Strictly History presentation, Preserving African American Cemeteries, led by Tamela Tenpenny-Lewis, co-founder and president of The Preservation of African American Cemeteries, Inc.
Cemetery records, markers, and physical burial places house a wealth of statistical and cultural data/information. For African American communities—long excluded from traditional informational networks, processes, and record-keeping moments in life—the untapped resource of burial grounds offers an unprecedented glimpse into a heavily shrouded past. This presentation will reveal the history of early black communities by connecting their past through research methods using cemetery transcriptions, slave narratives, oral history, genealogy and death records. Additional resource methods in protecting and preserving African American cemeteries will be provided.
The Preservation of African American Cemeteries (PAAC), a non-profit group that identifies, documents and preserves African American Cemeteries. Tamela is the recipient of (AGS) Association for Gravestone Studies; Oakley Certificate of Merit and Outstanding Achievement
Tamela Tenpenny-Lewis
in Preservation Advocacy Award presented by the Historic Preservation Alliance of Arkansas through its annual Arkansas Preservation Awards. She can also be seen in the Arkansas PBS documentary, Silent Storytellers. The documentary explores the history, culture, importance of preserving Arkansas’s cemeteries.
The Preservation of African American Cemeteries was founded in 2003 as a nonprofit organization managed and operated by a staff of dedicated volunteers. The PAAC mission statement – “to form a network of persons and/or groups committed to locating, researching, educating, documenting, reclaiming and preserving African American Cemeteries” – has inspired its leadership to lobby in the state legislature, create unique community engagement opportunities, host annual fundraisers, and provide scholarships for college-bound students from within the PAAC Junior Preservation Society.
For more than twenty years, the founders of PAAC have labored to encourage research, collaboration, documentation and presentation of the rich history and heritage of Arkansans of African descent through a surprising resource—cemeteries and their records.
PAAC is committed to recognizing cemeteries as places of both tribute and historical memory and connecting communities with their past. PAAC has successfully shared methods and techniques of proper cemetery restoration, archeological assistance and networked with caretakers and cemetery associations across the state in proper preservation methods. The organization’s successes have largely come from the dedication of members who volunteer their hours and subsidize their own travel throughout the state.
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