The Scattered Shallow Graves of America: And the Men Who Dug Them (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798185711743)

THE SCATTERED SHALLOW GRAVES OF AMERICA
And the Men Who Dug Them Lamont D. Lovelace, MA
(c) 2026 Lamont D. Lovelace, MA - Preview Edition

A NOTE TO THE READER

This is not a book about the past. The past is the foundation - but what stands on it is the present. Every chapter in this book traces a line from what was done to what is still being done. The men who dug the graves changed their tools across four centuries. The graves did not change.

INTRODUCTION: THE GROUND STILL MOVES In 2015, construction workers in Tulsa, Oklahoma, used ground penetrating radar to search for the bodies of Black Americans killed during the 1921 Greenwood massacre - when a white mob, deputized by the city government, burned 35 blocks of the most prosperous Black community in the United States to the ground. They found disturbed soil. They found evidence of mass graves. The city had known for decades. No one had looked. In 2018, construction workers in Sugar Land, Texas, discovered the remains of 95 Black men in unmarked graves on the grounds of a former sugar plantation. The men had been leased from the state prison system to work the fields after the Civil War - a legal form of re-enslavement the state of Texas had never publicly acknowledged. The graves keep appearing. They appear because they were never properly buried. They were covered over, built upon, paved over, and forgotten - because the truth they contain is inconvenient. This book is an act of excavation.

CHAPTER 5: THE CONSUMED The fear that enslaved Africans carried onto the slave ships was not abstract. It was specific. Many believed - with reason - that they were being taken to be eaten. Olaudah Equiano, who survived the Middle Passage and published his memoir in 1789, wrote that the enslaved people around him believed the white men who had taken them 'were going to kill us and eat us.' This was not ignorance. It was a rational response to the behavior of the men who had captured them. In 1837, the Portuguese slave ship Arrogante was intercepted by the Royal Navy. The court records document what the crew had done: they had slaughtered an enslaved man, cooked his flesh, and forced other captives to consume it. The purpose was terror. The method was cannibalism. After Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831, his body was skinned, his flesh rendered into grease, and his skin made into purses sold as souvenirs. In 1916, Jesse Washington was burned alive in Waco, Texas, before a crowd of 15,000 people. Flesh was cut from his body while he was still alive. Photographs were taken and sold as postcards. Harriet Jacobs was an enslaved girl who survived. She wrote it down. Her book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861, is the only full-length slave narrative written by an enslaved woman. It documented the sexual consumption of Black women's bodies - the systematic rape that was not called rape because the law did not recognize the personhood of the enslaved. Her book was buried for over a century. These are not stories from another civilization. They are American stories. They happened here. They were done by men who went to church on Sunday.
"Each period changed the shovel. The ground kept opening."
Lamont D. Lovelace, MA

Author: Lamont D. Lovelace
ISBN-13: 9798185711743
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 07/05/2026
Pages: 190
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.58lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.40d