University Communications Students to Clean and Document Oxford Cemetery Students from Oxford College and Emory University will become intimately acquainted with the university's history when they gather this Saturday, March 25 at 10 a.m. to clean up and document the portion of the Town of Oxford Historical Cemetery that was restricted to blacks. That section of the cemetery has not been well-maintained throughout the years, and has not been closely documented. Many of the Oxford residents buried in the black section of the cemetery were employees of Emory and later Oxford College when the university established the Atlanta campus. According to anthropologist and Oxford professor Mark Auslander, the cemetery is the resting place of many men and women who made significant contributions to the college during the past 160 years, including Robert Hammond (1858-1923) the college's head janitor whose headstone was donated by Emory students. The students will be joined by members of the Oxford community, and making an accurate record of the gravesites is equally important in the effort since records on the black section of the cemetery were not well kept. Another clean-up session will likely take place in April, and Auslander is planning an academic program on campus, reflecting on the history of the African-American cemetery and how it is intimately intertwined with the history of Emory. The efforts are sponsored by the sociology and anthropology departments at Oxford; by the Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory; and by the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life (the MARIAL Center), a new Sloan Foundation-funded initiative to examine family life in America.
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