At Copp's Hill Burying Ground, the gravestones of the prominent are kept upright, cleaned and legible. A few hundred feet away, the graves of more than a thousand Black Bostonians, many enslaved, many never named, sit cracked, sunken, and untouched.
As part of a three-person team reporting on the enslavement history hidden along Boston's Freedom Trail, I dug into Boston Parks and Recreation's annual budget, building pivot tables in Excel to trace exactly how much money the city allocated to grave restoration, and where it actually went. The numbers backed up what we'd already seen on the ground: restoration dollars were reaching the famous headstones, not the unmarked and deteriorating graves of the formerly enslaved. When we brought the discrepancy to city officials, they didn't just answer for it — they started restoring the neglected gravestones the following week.
Tags: Investigative Reporting · Public Records Analysis · Archival Reporting · Team Reporting
Context
Team project: three-person reporting team, part of a larger multi-part series on the Freedom Trail's enslavement history
My role: budget analysis and financial reporting, alongside shared field reporting and writing
Editors: Paul Singer and Brooke Williams
This was the first time I saw a story change something before it was even published; holding officials to their own numbers is what turned observation into accountability.