In this presentation we share the progress of our Black Memory and Death Care Work Project which includes the Black Cemetery Scholars Collective (BCSC) and a paper project tentatively titled: Tending to the Dead and Dying: Blackness, Memory, and the Radical Praxis of Preservation.” This project is funded through a graduate fellowship sponsored by the OSU Global Arts and Humanities Global Arts and Discovery Theme. In this work, we examine the intersection of humanist perspectives on death and memory, community-engaged preservation and Black critical theory. By fostering dialogue (both through academic writing and our BCSC working group) between the often-disparate fields of community-engaged preservation and ethnic studies, this work develops a praxis-oriented approach to preservation that is culturally specific and politically transformative. Through an interdisciplinary framework, we reimagine preservation as a radical, community-driven process that not only resists traditional power structures in heritage conservation but also confronts the violent exclusions at the heart of humanist ideologies. Ultimately, this study situates Blackness as a critical vantage point for rethinking the possibilities of preservation, memory, and the afterlives of the human.