Georgia: Atlanta's Oakland Cemetery

Oakland Cemetery is Atlanta’s burial place of record. It’s a city cemetery (with private ownership of lots). Many mayors are interred there including Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s first black mayor. For him, land was made available even though space today is at a premium.  He and Margaret Mitchell are the most notable luminaries in Oakland, though neither grave is very distinctive. The most distinctive memorial is a mausoleum built by a nobody (sorry!) obsessed with his own immortality. On top of the family’s vault, he placed himself (see him?) in his favorite chair facing the cemetery’s main gate: absolutely the best way to keep track of those who visit (and those who don’t).  In Victorian cemeteries, the best way of rising above the pack was to commission a marble sculpture, build an ornate mausoleum, or erect a granite marker taller than anyone else’s. All must have cost a fortune, but you learn so little about the people they are supposed to commemorate. Rather, their symbolic language seems to have a two-fold purpose.

One is to deny death: Ivy is ubiquitous as a symbol of everlasting life; marble shrouds are everywhere waiting to be lifted; and outlines of bedframes around many graves suggest that death is as temporary as sleep. Another purpose seems to be an attempt to reclaim the glory of ancient Greece and Rome: Sarcophagi and symbolic urns crown many memorials; obelisks and their imitators are the cemetery’s exclamation points, and columns, capitals, and other classical design elements all seem to proclaim the grandeur of the long-lost past and its re-emergence in Atlanta.

A decade or so after the town was founded as a rail terminus, a hill outside of Marthasville was selected as a site for the cemetery. Before the town's name became Atlanta, it was Marthasville. In fact, Martha Lumpkin Compton is buried here. I suspect she is not very happy!  Oakland's early founding and the cachet that comes with its elevated position (geographically and socially) means that the entire history of the city is somehow reflected on the landscape: not just in its grave markers, but also in its spatial design. Segregation in the city's cemetery is one of the themes that betrays the city's past, not that the South was unique in this regard. There are separate sections for Jews, an example of requested segregation, and for African Americans, an example of forced segregation.  There are also sections for Civil War soldiers who lost their lives on the battlefields near Atlanta, and for paupers who could not afford a proper burial nor (needless to say) grave markers.

Maynard Jackson became mayor of Atlanta ten years after the Civil Rights Act became the law of the land.  When he died in 2003, the city attempted to negate its segregationist past by using the city cemetery symbolically.  Maynard Jackson is buried in the old (read: white and privileged) part of the cemetery (look right) with neighbors who must have been segregationists in their time. I suspect, though, that they welcomed him to the neighborhood and heartily approve what Atlanta has become in the post-segregationist, if not exactly post-racial, South.