Via The Root, Essence tells us that Henrietta Lacks, the Baltimore woman whose cells were the first human ones to survive and reproduce in culture, finally gets a headstone for her grave.
After 59 years in an unmarked grave, Henrietta Lacks was honored with a headstone for her resting place, reports the Virginia Pilot. Friends and family gathered for a small ceremony in Clover, Virginia where Lacks has been buried on a family plot since 1951.
The story of Lacks and her cells was told most recently, and thoroughly, by Rebecca Skloot's book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, released this year, and one of Skloot's missions in the retelling of the story was to correct the record. For various reasons, the woman behind the cell line known as HeLa was often unknown or misreported after her death from cervical cancer in 1951. She was a poor black woman who sought treatment at Johns Hopkins, and they took her tissue without permission or remuneration. The cells, meanwhile, helped save us all from polio and were the first human cells to go to space. The combination of anonymity, of powerlessness, and of immortality is the most compelling aspect of the story, and Skloot tells it through how it affected Lacks' children, many of whom couldn't afford health insurance for themselves.
Until now, an unmarked grave shows just how unremarked Lacks' contribution was to the outside world. This is a fitting corrective.
-- Monica Potts
