Dr. Kami Fletcher

Hi!  I am an Associate Professor of American & African American History at Albright College and Co-Coordinator of the Women's and Gender Studies Program.  I received my Ph.D. in History from Morgan State University in 2013.  My research centers on a) African American burial grounds, b) contemporary African American rituals and c) early 20th century Black female undertakers.

The manuscript I am currently working on, Ain’t She Got No People: Life & Death at Mount Auburn Cemetery, frames this question within the larger social context for Black freedom and humanity during the Post-Colonial, Antebellum, and Reconstruction periods.  It does so by positioning African American cemeteries as the point where life and death meet arguing that this meeting point is a symbol of Black freedom from White control.  The crux of this argument hinges on my positioning Mount Auburn Cemetery  as a vehicle used by African Americans to obtain freedom.  This argument is developed in 3 stages.  First, readers are informed of the social and cultural push felt by the African American community to establish African American burial rights.  Second, readers are provided with an understanding that Mount Auburn Cemetery was purposefully used to gain autonomy from White power structures and systems of authority.  Third, the growth, development and very structure of the cemetery are all examined.

I have co-edited a volume, Till Death Do Us Part: Ethnic Cemeteries as Uncrossed Borders that is out with University of Mississippi Press (2020).
The book examines the borders erected by cemeteries.  Not limited to the physical gates and enclosures of the cemetery but the racial and ethnic borders of society, this volume interrogates the very reason certain ethnic groups maintained internal and external borders.  In this way, this volume is unique.  It does not take for granted the borders and limits represented within and outside burial grounds but seeks to understand the narrative and counter narrative constructed from these separations.

Next to research, teaching is my passion! I teach classes on various aspects of African American History and Women’s Studies.  I teach U.S. and African American History survey classes where students are invited to uncover the African experience in America.  Because African culture was such a deep and important part of their identity, these classes start with an overview of pre-colonial West African nations.  Throughout these courses, students understand the major developments in each epoch of African American history, the resistance and struggle for freedom, and the undeniable impact African Americans had (and have) on making this nation.  These classes also have a cultural overlay where students are required to examine the African American experience with a gendered lens.  Understanding how patriarchy shapes race, students ask how this power structure shaped African American history in general, Black women and men specifically, and the collective Black community as a whole. 

I teach classes on Plantation History that examines the institution of slavery in the United States.  The focus is on the plantation with even further attention paid to the plantation home.  In this way, students are forced to deal with the very gendered dynamics of the home and the very close interaction between the slaveholding Whites and enslaved African Americans.  Students see gender develops and even fosters complex and peculiar relationships between the Black and White women of the house as well as how gender trumps the white supremacy shared by the slave holder and the slave mistress of the house.  Students also see how the plantation sustained slavery but also sustained an institution that led to a racial caste system that is still somewhat maintained in our society today.  The second component of this class requires students to take a field trip to a nearby plantation where they examine the memory and legacy of plantations today.  Students are forced to make sense of the social forgetting that has happened where the White slaveholders have become American royalty and the enslaved African Americans have morphed to servants and many times erased from the plantation all together.