A premature burial incident within the Black community — however dramatic within that community — might not have been considered newsworthy by the white editors of the Augusta Chronicle or the Columbia State.

Medical records from Black patients in the rural South in 1915 were not systematically preserved or made publicly available.

Church records — which might have documented a burial — would have existed within Black church institutions that did not necessarily interface with the broader documentary record in ways that would have left archives accessible to later researchers.

The evidentiary vacuum surrounding the alleged events of 1915 is, in short, partly a function of the specific historical conditions of Black life in the Jim Crow South.

Events that would have been documented in other community contexts were not documented here, not necessarily because they didn’t happen, but because the systems that document events were not consistently applied to this community.