Lawrence NAACP to dedicate markers for 30 Black graves at Oak Hill Cemetery

A stretch of Oak Hill Cemetery long hidden from the public record is finally being marked. The Lawrence NAACP will dedicate 30 granite grave markers for 31 identified members of the Black community buried in Potter’s Field, where more than 1,000 people were laid to rest with fewer than 10 grave markers before this project.

The dedication is set for 7 p.m. Wednesday, June 10, at the Potter’s Field section of Oak Hill Cemetery, 1605 Oak Hill Ave., and it will be followed by the annual remembrance of Isaac King, George Robertson and Peter Vinegar, who were lynched by an all-white mob on June 10, 1882. This year’s observance marks the 144th anniversary of that racial terror and places the cemetery project squarely inside Lawrence’s broader effort to confront how Black history was erased from public memory.

Potter’s Field, in the far northeast corner of the cemetery, was used from 1866 to 1917 for people who could not afford burial or who were unknown, including African American residents, immigrants, the poor and indigent, and unbaptized infants. For decades, the ground held thousands of stories with little to mark them. The current project grew out of a six-year effort by the Lawrence NAACP, the Equal Justice Initiative and community partners to locate the graves of the lynching victims and then expand the search to others buried in the field.

That work depended on a community volunteer geophysical survey, help from the University of Kansas, the Kansas Geological Survey, the Douglas County Historical Society and local historians. Kerry Altenbernd, chair of the NAACP’s Community Coordination and History Committee, said in March that there are likely more than 1,000 people buried on top of one another in Potter’s Field, a sign of how much burial history in Lawrence remained obscured. The marker project now gives 31 names, along with years of birth and death, a permanent place in the cemetery.

The effort was funded in part by a 2025 $10,000 grant from the Douglas County Heritage Conservation Council, which helped pay for purchasing, engraving and installing the markers. It also builds on the City of Lawrence’s 2025 cemetery website update, which made more than 1,000 Oak Hill Potter’s Field burials searchable for the first time. A marker for Margaret Vinegar, the 14-year-old daughter whose case was tied to the 1882 violence, is part of the remembrance work, along with the 2022 marker near the old Kansas River Bridge for Isaac King, George Robertson and Peter Vinegar. The public is invited, and attendees are asked to bring chairs because no seating will be provided.