Treyton Littlejohn on Black Burial in Boston: From Records to Reparative Justice.

Treyton Littlejohn is a Boston University graduate and is currently leading a project funded by the Boston Mayor’s Office and Reparations Task Force to create a database of 5,000 Black and Indigenous individuals buried in 18th- and 19th-century Boston.

This conversation was recorded on September 23, 2025, prior to his Zoom presentation for the Coalition on October 8th, 2025. This interview represents the view of the speaker and not necessarily that of the Slave Legacy History Coalition. It has been edited for clarity and length.

Naomi:  Treyton, could you start by introducing yourself and summarizing what you do?

Treyton: I’m a Boston University graduate, originally from Los Angeles, of mixed background. I’m half Japanese American, and my family was interned during World War II and later received reparations. So social justice in the U.S. context has been a big part of my life and my interest in studying history.

At BU I studied art history, archaeology, and architecture. Burial sites became interesting to me as a way of understanding the racial and social history of Boston. That research evolved into the work I’m now doing with the mayor’s office on their reparations task force — looking at burial sites, cemeteries, and death records as a way to do reparative history for descendants of enslavement and for Black communities after slavery.

The project started by asking whether cemeteries held evidence of segregation and racism. The obvious answer is yes, simply in how invisible Black life is in Boston cemeteries. Unless you know where to look, or you’re part of a community that remembers, you go to the major cemeteries preserved today and see almost no evidence of Black or Indigenous life.

There's only so much you can do by looking at the cemeteries. You can only glean so much after going to ten different ones in Boston and not seeing much evidence of non-white community life. You have to start asking new questions, and that is why I started looking at archival records, vital records of the state of Massachusetts and the city of Boston.

I realized those records were racialized starting in the 1700s and 1800s. I pulled out entries marked “colored” or “red,” and that’s when the database took shape. Now it includes roughly 5,000 non-white individuals buried in Boston.

That’s where we’re at now, and with funding from the mayor’s office we’ve been able to continue building and analyzing the database.

Naomi: You talked about your family’s heritage prompting your interest in reparative work. But was there a particular moment that made cemeteries, specifically, the site you wanted to explore?

Treyton: Yeah, I actually have a good answer for this because it’s the story I opened my honors thesis with.

In L.A., the overwhelming majority of my Japanese American family is buried in one cemetery. There are a lot of jokes about it because it’s run down — the grass is never green, even though it’s called Evergreen Cemetery. When you go, you see an entire section that’s Japanese. From the writing and the last names, you can tell it’s a Japanese American section, either by choice or segregation.

So from a young age, I always thought of cemeteries as contested terrain. I understood that burial sites were not just the place that all people go to rest forever. It is political and it is segregated. So that drew me to cemeteries in Boston. 

There was also an initial moment in class that really shaped this work. I was taking a seminar with my favorite professor, Deborah Kahn, on Mount Auburn and Boston’s cemeteries through the lens of material culture and art history. We went to the Cambridge North Burial Ground, which I know SLHC is very connected to because of Darby Vassall. At the time, I didn’t know any of that history.

She asked us to walk around and find a prompt for our term papers. As I walked along the edge of the burial ground, I came across the graves of Jane and Cicely, two women enslaved by men at Harvard. Jane was 22 and Cicely 13. Their enslaver’s name was carved right on their stones: Jane, Negro servant of Andrew Bordman. 

There’s something about those gravestones — they’re so flat. You get a one-dimensional record of who these women were, and half of that dimension is Andrew Bordman. That reality is depressing and sad, but it also opens up big questions. The fact that Jane and Cicely even have gravestones — who else is in that site without one? Who might be in the suspected mass pit next to them that didn’t get a gravestone? And if you abstract that across the entire city, you realize Black life is real and present, but unless you’re asking the right questions, you won’t see it.

I remember asking Professor Kahn if she knew anything about them, and she didn’t. From that confrontation with history, this whole project began.

Naomi:  What other conceptions of Boston or Cambridge as most know it, do you think your work challenges?

Treyton: I think it challenges the idea of Boston as a liberal, abolitionist, anti-slavery, progressive, historic city. People in Boston are very proud that it’s this highly educated, forward-thinking nexus of white abolitionists. And that history is true. The Liberator newspaper, the Black abolitionist movement—it’s indisputable that much of that came from or ended up in Boston.

But it’s also true that many of the people who became wealthy from the labor of enslaved people lived in cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. When you understand that, and you look at burial sites as evidence, the fact that there were enslaved people in Boston challenges this conception of the city as a shining beacon of hope for Black America. That’s something Boston still needs to unlearn.

The second piece, which I think is even more important, goes beyond Boston to our American history as a whole: the idea that Black life was invisible, gone, or non-existent. Some people believe Black life didn’t exist. And within academia, there’s often a pessimistic outlook that because Black people were systematically erased from the record, it’s borderline impossible to do the reparative work of restoring their histories.

But if there’s one takeaway I hope this project offers, it’s proof that if you ask the right questions of archives, you can find evidence of vibrant Black community life. If you dig deeper into probate records, church records, birth or marriage records, you can start to see the kinship networks of Black Boston. 

Yes, that history was systematically erased and made invisible. But it's there. That's what's most inspiring to me about this work. We’re really just scratching the surface of what’s possible with these records. And I hope someone else, maybe a student at BU or Northeastern right now, will come along and ask new questions of them.

Naomi:  When you speak about the supposed impossibility of this work, I think about the power of oral history. In academia, oral and family histories are often considered “lower” in the hierarchy of evidence than official records.

 Treyton: That’s a great point and I think the oral history piece is something I still probably overlook. When I first talked to the professors at Tufts doing reparations research for the mayor, Kerri Greenidge said, “Oh my God, I remember my grandfather always talking about the South End.” Other people had similar reactions: “Oh my God, the South End—that’s where Black souls are in Boston.” For me, that was a real learning experience. Sometimes you just need to ask what the community knows. What do they feel about these places? And what have they experienced as part of their generational ties to the city?

I was lucky that my research led me to those conclusions, but I think about how my academic upbringing at Boston University contributed to that blind spot. Moving this research forward, it’s really about prioritizing the people who know this history. The archives and evidence just back that up. I’m glad you mentioned that.

Naomi:  Thinking back to oral history and how families pass down knowledge, I’m wondering where you see this project headed. Is there intergenerational work to be done, and how might it expand into the community?

Treyton:  This is going to be covered on the 8th because for me this is the whole point of doing a talk with SLHC.

My main concern is what we’re doing with the database — roughly 5,000 individuals in a spreadsheet on my Google Drive. The mayor’s office is going to publish a chapter analyzing it, what it means in the context of the legacy of enslavement, and whether there’s an argument that it should be considered in reparations for slavery.

As the database grew, so did my excitement that more people would have connections to it. Black communities in Boston might know people in it, might have ancestors in it. I’ve only gone through about 1866 so far, but the records run to 1912. It’s hundreds of hours of going line by line, transcribing by hand. I’ve tried AI tools and OCR, but you still have to do it manually to get it right. Finishing the full dataset for every Black and Indigenous person is a huge task.

The second part is genealogical research. Each person has a story and has records somewhere. My dream for the database is that people will invest more information into it to build out each individual story.

So, the potential in my mind there is almost limitless. The main thing is this database needs to end up in the community's hands for whatever kind of work that the Black community wants it to serve.

My hope is that with the talk on the 8th, someone might see a way to connect this work to the community better than I can. Otherwise, it’s just a relic sitting in my Google Drive. Proof of segregation and racialized violence, but with no reparative work happening. That’s my hope.

Naomi: What’s something you won’t have time to cover in your talk but wish people knew about the project?

Treyton: There are a lot of ways to think about this research as it relates to my talk. It’s mostly about Boston’s communities and reparative justice in that context. But there’s also a more academic angle: using burial site research as a comparative text for understanding colonialism and racial violence at the institutional or state level.

I’m really fascinated by the British Empire, the French Empire, the Spanish Empire, and the German Empire—how they created archives of death for colonial subjects, and how, say, a PhD student might think about the politics of the burial site. How do you compare the logics of imperial structures through the treatment of their colonial subjects? There’s a lot of research on specific case studies, and there’s work on cemeteries as political texts, but not as much on the broader question of the colonial logic of death, or necropolitics.

That’s where I hope to go personally. That’s my next step: more study and more research in that space. And I’m very grateful to Boston for prompting that thinking, because I think if more people asked these kinds of questions, looking at burial sites and death as a way to study colonial logic, you would learn a lot about how colonialism functioned and also about the experiences of colonized people, even in death.