- Thousands of segregated cemeteries across the country, where African Americans ranging from former slaves to celebrities have been buried for decades, have been plagued by neglect, abandonment and destruction.
- In recent years, increased awareness and discoveries of underground tombs in various locations have spurred conservation efforts.
- In Washington, D.C., a historically black sorority has recruited experts to find the burial site of one of its 1919 founders.
Neglect, abandonment and destruction have been the fate of the thousands of segregated cemeteries across the country where African Americans, from former slaves to prominent politicians and business executives, have been buried for decades. .
In recent years, increased awareness and the discovery of graves under parking lots, schools, and even air force bases has led to state and local governments wanting to re-establish spiritually vital ancestral connections. Preservation activities are becoming more active among local residents.
In Washington, D.C., members of a historically black sorority are recruiting experts to discover the history of one of the sorority’s founders, hidden in plain sight in an overgrown and neglected section of Woodlawn Cemetery. He helped discover the 1919 burial site.
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In Miami, Jesse Wooden purchased a historically segregated black cemetery that also suffered from neglect. He and his brother Frank, who serves as his caretaker, have a strong motivation to restore the cemetery. There is the grave of his mother Vivian, who died when Jesse was an infant.
On February 26, 2024, Jesse Wooden, owner of Lincoln Memorial Park Cemetery, is seen in Miami’s Brownsville neighborhood. Wooden bought the cemetery after learning that his mother, who died when he was young, was buried there. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandia)
“When we got here, it was like a jungle,” Frank Wooden said. “Some had to jump over fences to see their loved ones.”
When sites of sacred cultural memory are desecrated, Brent Leggs said, the added trauma is added to the humiliation of being isolated even in death. He is executive director of the African American Heritage Action Fund and senior vice president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
These groups have played an important role in raising awareness of threats to cemetery preservation, including vandalism, abandonment, ownership disputes, and development. These groups not only provide technical expertise, but also legal and conservation advocacy.
“There is a growing recognition among the public that cemeteries are parks that should be experienced as places of reflection and remembrance, rather than haunted and frightening places,” Leggs said.
At the Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in Miami’s Brownsville neighborhood, members of the community are offering cold water to workers who are currently weeding, cleaning and repainting the crypts to show their appreciation. Some of them date from the late 19th century.
When Jessie Wooden was in her late 40s, she happened to meet her aunt and learned about her mother’s final resting place, so she decided to visit, but the vast cemetery was overgrown, infested with snakes, and surrounded by rubble. .
Now, when he comes to work, he passes the cellar and the spreading banyan trees and prays at his mother’s grave.
“I never knew her my entire life. All I knew was that my mother was gone,” Wooden said. “It means a lot to me to be able to come to where she’s resting and say her little prayers and talk to her.”
As a child, Marvin Dunn, professor emeritus at Florida International University and historian of race relations in Florida, would visit his great-grandmother’s grave for annual spring cleanup and mark the site with a Coke bottle. I remember when I helped him.
“It was a ritual,” Dunn said. “Especially her grandmother, who wouldn’t have tolerated not cleaning that grave once a year.”
Dunn’s great-grandmother’s gravesite belonged to a church, and those gravesites are likely to survive, he said. But when entire communities are uprooted, privately owned cemeteries on newly valuable land are often sold to developers with little opposition, resulting in dozens of graves that may never be found again. Thousands of black graves were created.
“The places where we bury our dead remain part of our history, part of our lives, part of our souls,” Dunn said. “If you don’t know where your ancestors are, you can’t have that connection…and that’s a tragic loss.”
In 2022, Congress passed the African American Cemetery Preservation Act as a program within the National Park Service. Efforts to secure funding are ongoing. Last year, Florida passed a bill to fund the restoration of historic Black cemeteries. Dunn said the state needs to help families access privately owned cemeteries.
“Dignity is paramount,” said Antoinette Jackson, a professor at the University of South Florida. She leads the African American Burial Grounds and Memorial Project in the Tampa area, where black graves have been discovered in recent years under business parking lots and school campuses.
Elsewhere in Tampa, an estimated 800 black graves remain at Zion Cemetery, established in 1901 as the city’s first black cemetery. The Tampa Housing Authority is redeveloping some of the graves by building apartment complexes on top of them, said Leroy Moore, the agency’s chief operating officer.
The location of the grave was confirmed using ground-penetrating radar, five buildings above the burial site were closed, 32 families were relocated, and efforts were made to preserve the area and establish a genealogical research center.
“You have to know your history,” Moore said.
In Miami, the Wooden brothers are working to restore family and community ties, one crumbling cemetery at a time.
“People can be proud of where their loved ones are buried, and they can be proud to go back and visit,” said Frank. Jesse Wooden said while carefully brushing away the dirt. “We’re open, we’re visiting, we’re burying, in short, we’re getting things done.”
In the summer of 2018 in Washington, members of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority sought to accomplish their goal of finding a final resting place for Edna Brown Coleman, one of its 22 founding members.
The tragic circumstances of Brown Coleman’s death in September 1919 were uniquely woven into the sorority’s legacy. Legend has it that Edna Brown held some of her first meetings in her living room before graduating summa cum laude from Howard University.
She met and fell in love with Frank Coleman, founder of the Omega Sci-Fi fraternity, and became pregnant, but she died along with the baby during childbirth. They were buried together.
Since then, the Coleman family’s story has lived on. Marriages between members of both organizations are known as “Coleman Love” stories. However, the location of Edna’s burial place remained a mystery.
To find out, the sorority turned to Marjorie Kinard, resident historian of the Delta Sigma Theta Alumni Chapter in Washington, D.C., who first took the pledge as a student at historically black Livingston College in the 1960s. I called out.
“When I got off the phone, we talked right away,” she said.
Filled with surprise and excitement about his new role, Kinard quickly confirmed that Brown-Coleman was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery, a 22.5-acre cemetery in Washington.
Established in 1895, Woodlawn is home to approximately 36,000 burial grounds, many of them buried by people such as Blanche K. Bruce, a Mississippi senator from 1875 to 1881, and playwright and educator Mary Powell Brill. He is a prominent black American.
But Kinard’s awe turned to fear when volunteers opened the gates to a small contingent of sorority members to find their ancestors. The grass was overgrown with shrubbery and weeds that hadn’t been cut in months or even years. Several gravestones were scattered carelessly.
Desecration is an unfortunate reality, as in the case of the Moses Macedonian African Cemetery in Bethesda, Maryland. Supporters of the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition are locked in a legal battle to prevent a developer from selling the land where the cemetery once stood. The case is being considered by the Maryland Supreme Court.
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In the town of Roslyn on Long Island, New York, a librarian named Carol Clark recently reburied members of the Salem African Methodist Episcopal Church after a wealthy family purchased land to build a chicken coop in 1899. I found the place where it was. .
At Woodlawn, the revelation that the sorority founder’s full name was Mary Edna Brown Coleman was hidden beneath the overgrown shrubbery above Brown Coleman’s gravestone.
It was soon discovered that two founders of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, Sarah Meriwether Nutter and Marjorie Arizona Hill, were also buried at Woodlawn. Kinard reached out to another sorority leader and together they started the Woodlawn Collaborative Project. This is an initiative designed to ensure that the ground is never neglected again.
“I was really happy that the cemetery was safe,” Kinard said.
