To Serve the Living

Suzanne E. Smith

“A revelation… Only the most imaginative scholar could use the history of African-American funeral directors to uncover a pivotal part of the struggle for civil rights. That’s precisely what Suzanne Smith has done in this wonderfully original, engaging, and illuminating book.”—Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age

“A lyrical portrait of the African American funeral profession tells us how, for over a century, burying the dead uplifted a people and a profession together amid deep American prejudice that demeaned both. Exploring practices utterly central to African Americans’ living cultural and religious history, Smith has created a history readers will remember long after the book has left their hands.”—Jon Butler, Yale University

“Smith’s richly detailed history of black funerals illuminates the living world of African American experience. An incredibly important book.”—Gary Laderman, author of Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America

“By getting the dead where they need to go, the living get where they need to be. This deeply human pilgrimage is at the center of Smith’s book on African American funeral directors and their frontline service to the nation’s journeys from slavery and civil war, through Jim Crow and ‘separate but equal’ marketplaces—the sad and violent, heroic and hopeful history of race relations and civil rights.”—Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade

“A terrific book. Elegantly written and replete with fascinating details of the African American way of death, To Serve the Living lays bare the role played by black funeral directors in the long struggle for freedom.”—Shane White, co-author of Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars

Related Links

• Listen to a short interview with Suzanne E. Smith on the HUP Podcast

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