Elijah Rodriguez, a senior at Marquette University High School, spent a recent English class on his hands and knees in Forest Home Cemetery and Arboretum in Milwaukee, scrubbing clean the gravestones of Murphy Pleasant and his son, Murphy Pleasant Jr.
Murphy Sr. was a World War II veteran, and Murphy Jr. died while serving in Vietnam.
Rodriguez told “Wisconsin Today” that the exercise gave him a different perspective on those who have lived before.
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“It reminded me that even when people are gone, the way we care for their memory says a lot about who we are today,” he said.
Rodriguez is one of several students who helped clean gravestones at the cemetery for the school’s literature and social justice class. Maeve Gavagan, who teaches the class, says the idea is to connect the books the students are reading to the people who helped struggle for social justice throughout Milwaukee’s history.
“In our class, we focused on the idea of literature and story as a way of showing our belief in the dignity of every person and also our connection to other people,” Gavagan told “Wisconsin Today.” “Our work at Forest Home Cemetery has been really wonderful in that students have had an opportunity to care for the place … We start with stories, and then we jump into the worlds of those stories, and then we always return to our own world where students have an opportunity to then engage.”
Gavagan got the idea at a seminar for the MKE Roots Initiative, which connects classrooms to various civics and community efforts around the city.
This semester, her students are reading are Matthew Desmond’s “Evicted,” which explores housing and civil rights in Milwaukee, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun,” which focuses on memory and human dignity and how lives matter to others.
Diego Cordero, one of Gavagan’s students who worked at Forest Home Cemetery, told “Wisconsin Today” that the work helped him connect with the community around him. Cordero cleaned the gravestone of Duane Toliver, a man who marched with Father James Groppi during the Civil Rights Movement and helped protect protestors.
“What stands out to me is how I had the opportunity to do something so small and it just showed how I can help the community out in a quiet but powerful way,” Cordero said. “Seeing the difference, before and after, showed me how small actions can make a big impact and furthered the history of what Duane did.”
Gavagan said that while her class focuses mostly on fiction, she wanted to show how stories relate to real people and communities.
Descendants of the people whose headstones Gavagan’s class cleaned have been commenting on Facebook posts, showing gratitude for the work and care put into restoring their family legacies, Gavagan said.
Cleaning gravestones involves hours pulling black overgrowth with an edger, wiping down headstones with cleaning solutions and scraping out crusted-on pieces of dirt with toothpicks. Rodriguez said the work is about more than just making a gravestone look beautiful.
“We’re not just taking care of the stone, we’re preserving our history and honoring their memory, making sure their stories aren’t lost,” Rodriguez said. “It also connects to our roots and reminds us that reembracing an active responsibility is not something that we should easily forget about.”
