The Dallas exhibition The Mount: A Photo Collection on Restoring America’s Buried Past documented one family’s effort to recover an abandoned African American cemetery in East Texas.
Journalist Rodney Hawkins began the project after a conversation with his great-grandmother led him to investigate his family history and locate a burial ground in the woods near Nacogdoches.
Restoration as an act of family history
Hawkins called relatives from across the United States to help clear and restore the cemetery. The work revealed how easily burial sites connected with formerly enslaved people and their descendants could disappear through neglect, redevelopment or the loss of local knowledge.
Photographer Kwesi Yanful recorded the process. His images became the core of the exhibition at Daisha Board Gallery, where Hawkins served as producer and creative director.
The photographs connected physical labour with historical research. Clearing vegetation and identifying graves became a way of recovering names, property and relationships that had been obscured.
A Juneteenth connection across generations
One photograph referred to an ancestor purchasing cattle and property as a free man on 19 June, 148 years before the exhibition’s Juneteenth gathering. Some of that property remained in the family.
Gallery owner Daisha Board described the exhibition as emotionally powerful because visitors could recognise elements of their own family histories within the images.
The restored cemetery was later recognised as a historic landmark by the State of Texas under the guidance of the Texas Historical Commission. Hawkins’s research also contributed to the Lone Star Slavery Project at Stephen F. Austin State University.
The Mount showed photography functioning as evidence, memorial and public invitation. The exhibition asked viewers to consider how much history remains physically present but unmarked beneath familiar landscapes.