Incorporated in 1875, the Olivewood Cemetery in Houston, Texas, is a historic African American cemetery where more than four thousand Black citizens are buried. Source: Descendants of Olivewood, 2021.
For years, neglect and the creeping landscape of the nearby White Oak Bayou threatened to erase Olivewood Cemetery, the first incorporated African American cemetery in Houston, Texas. That changed only when local elders and long-term residents formed the Descendants of Olivewood, a nonprofit dedicated to its preservation, maintenance, and cultural interpretation. Yet, even with this stewardship, the cemetery faces an uphill battle with the threat of routine floods, erosion, windstorms, repeated hurricanes, and encroaching development.
The endangerment of this site is indicative of a broader national pattern. Disasters pose significant threats to the restoration, function, and preservation of burial landscapes across the country. Historic African American cemeteries are disproportionately exposed to hazards. Despite this heightened vulnerability, these sacred places receive limited recognition in formal recovery planning, and traditional post-disaster assessments often overlook the unique conditions of African American burial grounds.
A handpainted sign, put up by the Descendants of Olivewood, near the entrance of the cemetary. Source: Jennifer Rochon Blanks.
Careful risk assessments and more robust support for preservation and disaster recovery are needed to address these compounding crises and protect this vital cultural infrastructure. What is at stake goes beyond damaged headstones and eroded soil; it encompasses place-based knowledge embedded within African American communities and the enduring educational, cultural, and spiritual functions of cemeteries.
The Unique Vulnerabilities of African American Cemeteries
Historic African American cemeteries often exist in an active state of recovery long before a hurricane or flood arrives. Many have endured a centuries-long disaster of institutional neglect, exclusion from public record-keeping, and chronic underfunding. As a result, standard post‑disaster assessments—designed around measurable contamination or visible structural damage—frequently overlook the specific challenges of these sites. For example, in many African American cemeteries, markers are handmade, nonpermanent, or undocumented due to legally enforced segregation‑era barriers to formal burial records. When these features are missing or misread, the true extent of disaster impact goes unreported, making the path to “full” recovery nearly impossible.
Post disaster cleanup can compound the problem. Well-intentioned efforts to “clear” or “restore” land—debris removal, grading, vegetation cutting—can inadvertently obscure grave locations, disturb culturally significant memorial practices, or erase fragile evidence of burial presence. In landscapes where memory is already precarious, these interventions can cause a second, quieter form of loss.
Proactive Documentation and Preservation
Proactive documentation and preservation must be central to hazard mitigation planning for African American cemeteries. Many of these sites are still fighting for basic recognition while simultaneously attempting to reduce the risk of natural hazards. Combining archival research with environmental and spatial data is essential to reconstruct burial records and restore knowledge lost through decades of neglect and environmental disturbance.
Partnerships with researchers and genealogists can play a transformative role in restoration and recovery efforts. At Olivewood, for example, a collaboration with Rice University has helped reconstruct lost burial knowledge through Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR)—a noninvasive method that transmits radar pulses into the ground and records subsurface reflections to detect and map anomalies like unmarked graves—and through the recovery of archival plot records. These efforts have restored cemetery maps and identified previously undocumented graves, strengthening both preservation and disaster-planning capacity.
Hazard-based planning frameworks that might otherwise justify relocation are neither feasible nor ethically appropriate for most African American cemeteries. In Olivewood’s case, its Texas Historical Marker designation, deep descendant ties, and ongoing efforts toward National Register listing anchor the site firmly within Houston’s First Ward cultural landscape. Preservation in place is not simply a preference—it is an ethical imperative.
Supporting Stewardship in an Unequal System
Many historic African American cemeteries depend heavily on community advocacy and volunteer labor, revealing how post-disaster recovery funding structures routinely privilege formally resourced institutions while sidelining culturally significant yet underfunded burial grounds. This disparity represents a persistent challenge within both environmental justice and cultural resource management: African American cemeteries remain excluded from the institutional pipelines that typically sustain preservation and recovery work.
The author, Jennifer Rochon Blanks, leads an environmental justice tour at Olivewood Cemetery. Source: Jennifer Rochon Blanks.
Local regulations and state cemetery policies further constrain access to resources by determining who qualifies for funding, what types of interventions are permissible, and which administrative hurdles must be cleared. Community led organizations—often operating without formal preservation infrastructure—are left to navigate systems that were not designed with burial landscapes in mind, while simultaneously performing labor-intensive restoration.
Community programming—including school and civic presentations, walking tours interpreting African American burial traditions, and events highlighting Black history—extends recovery beyond physical repair. Such activities engage diverse people in the process of understanding historical forces and the connection to the present. There is also growing interest in recognizing the cemetery as a recreational green space, consistent with its classification as parkland within environmental planning. This framing not only broadens public engagement but also strengthens the case for integrating African American cemeteries into long-term resilience and land use planning.
Sustaining Sacred Landscapes
The experience of Olivewood Cemetery reveals that post disaster recovery is not only a matter of physical repair, but a reflection of whose histories are recognized as worthy of protection in the face of mounting environmental risks. As sites of memory, resistance, and community continuity, historic burial grounds occupy a precarious position within recovery and preservation frameworks that privilege visibility, documentation, and institutional legitimacy. Olivewood demonstrates how environmental vulnerability intersects with structural neglect, forcing descendant communities to shoulder the labor of recovery while simultaneously fighting for recognition. Its restoration is therefore not only an act of preservation, but a reclamation of historical presence in a cityscape that had rendered it invisible.
Recognizing African American cemeteries as critical cultural infrastructure—rather than marginal or abandoned land—requires integrating these sites into disaster planning, expanding access to preservation resources, and supporting community led stewardship across generations. Olivewood stands as both a warning and a model for cemeteries across the country: a reminder that equitable hazard mitigation planning must account for sacred landscapes where history, environment, and justice converge.
Jennifer Rochon Blanks is the tribal coordinator and cemetery specialist for the Texas Department of Transportation and the founder of The Cemetery Sista, LLC. She is an environmental scientist, planner, and cultural resource management expert, rooted in scholar of environmental justice and critical geographies. Her work bridges natural resource protection and cultural heritage preservation, with a focus on African American burial grounds and memorialized landscapes in communities vulnerable to climate change. Blanks’ research analyzes geo-ethnographic data to assess cemetery risks and vulnerabilities, recover and document cultural landscape knowledge, and identify sustainable strategies for long-term cemetery management.