appeals, the cemetery was demolished in 1958 to make room for the development of a shopping center. Prior to the bulldozing of the cemetery, a few hundred gravestones and an unknown number of burials (fewer than 200) were exhumed and relocated to a new site in Carroll County. Ongoing archival research has thus far documented over 18,000 (projected to be over 40,000) original burials, most of which still remain interred beneath the Belair-Edison Crossing shopping center property, which occupies the footprint of the old cemetery. This book highlights and historicizes underexplored and forgotten people and events associated with the cemetery, stressing the importance of their work in laying the social, economic, and political foundation for Baltimore's African American community. Additionally, this text details the unsuccessful fight to prevent the cemetery's destruction and the more recent grassroots formation of the Laurel Cemetery Memorial Project to research and commemorate the site and the people buried there.