A funeral is, among many highly emotional things, an opportunity to consecrate someone’s life as historical fact, and to commit that truth to the public record. But what happens once those records—and the memories of those who witnessed those rites—are themselves lost within history? A new initiative by the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) is attempting to address that problem. In May 2020, the DLG introduced a free digital archive of some 3,348 programs from funerals of Black Americans who died between 1886 and 2019. (The archive will continue to…
