MIAMI– Neglect, abandonment and destruction have been the fate of thousands of segregated cemeteries across the country where African Americans – from former slaves to prominent politicians and business owners – were buried for many decades.
In the past few years, growing awareness and the discovery of graves beneath parking lots, schools and even an Air Force base have galvanized conservation efforts by state and local governments, as well as community members seeking to restore ancestral ties that are spiritually crucial.
In Washington, D.C., members of a historically black fraternity recruited an expert to help locate the 1919 burial site of one of the fraternity’s founders, hidden from view in an overgrown, badly neglected section of Woodlawn Cemetery.
In Miami, Jessie Wooden purchased a historically segregated black cemetery that also suffered from neglect. He and his brother Frank – who works as a caretaker – have a powerful motive to try to restore the cemetery: it is home to the grave of their mother, Vivian, who died when Jessie was a baby.
“When we got here it looked like a jungle,” Frank Wooden said. “Some people had to jump the fence to get in to see their loved one.”
When places of sacred cultural memory are violated, it adds additional trauma to the humiliation of being separated, even after death, says Brent Leggs. He is executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and senior vice president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
These groups have been instrumental in raising awareness of threats to cemetery preservation, such as vandalism, neglect, ownership disputes, and development. The groups provide technical expertise, as well as legal and conservation advocacy.
“There is a growing awareness among the public that cemeteries are not these spooky, terrifying places, but parks that should be experienced as places of reflection and remembrance,” Leggs said.
At Lincoln Memorial Park Cemetery in Miami’s Brownsville neighborhood, community members now stop by to say thanks and bring cold water to workers who weed, clean and repaint crypts, some of which date back to the late 1800s.
After Jessie Wooden chanced upon an aunt in his late 40s and heard about his mother’s resting place, he tried to visit it, only to find the enormous cemetery overgrown, infested with snakes and surrounded by rubble.
Now when he comes to work, he walks past the crypts and spreads banyan trees to pray at his mother’s grave.
‘I haven’t known her all my life. All I knew was mom was gone,” Wooden said. “To be able to come where she’s resting and just say a little prayer and talk to her, oh, that means so much to me.”
Marvin Dunn, a professor emeritus at Florida International University and a historian of race relations in Florida, remembers childhood visits to his great-grandmother’s grave for annual spring cleaning, when he helped mark the spot with Coke bottles.
“It was the ritual,” Dunn said. “My grandmother in particular would not have allowed that grave not to be cleaned once a year.”
Dunn’s great-grandmother’s burial plots belonged to a church, and those burial grounds were more likely to survive, he said. But where entire communities were uprooted, privately owned cemeteries on newly valuable land were often sold to developers with little or no objection – leading to hundreds of thousands of black graves that may never be found again.
“Where we bury our dead remains a part of our history, a part of our life, a part of our soul,” 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 Burial Grounds Preservation Act as a program within the National Park Service; Efforts are underway to secure financing. Last year, Florida passed a bill to fund the restoration of historic black cemeteries. Dunn says the state should also help families access private cemeteries.
“Dignity is the most important thing,” said Antoinette Jackson, a professor at the University of South Florida. She runs the African American cemetery & Remembering Project in the Tampa area, where black burial sites have been discovered under a business parking lot and a school campus in recent years.
Elsewhere in Tampa, an estimated 800 graves of black people remain from Zion Cemetery, founded in 1901 as the city’s first cemetery for blacks. The Tampa Housing Authority is redeveloping a housing complex built on top of some graves, said Leroy Moore, the authority’s chief operating officer.
The use of ground-penetrating radar confirmed the location of the graves, leading to the closure of five buildings above the cemetery, the relocation of 32 families, and efforts to preserve the area and create a genealogical research center.
“You have to know your history,” Moore said.
In Miami, the Wooden brothers try to restore family and community ties step by step.
“People can be proud, you know, where their loved ones are buried. And they can be… proud to visit again,” Jessie Wooden said as Frank painstakingly swept the dirt from a nearby crypt. “We’re open, we’re visiting, we’re burying, I mean, we’re getting things done.”
In Washington in the summer of 2018, members of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority tried to get things done — namely, finding the final resting place of one of its 22 founding members, Edna Brown Coleman.
The tragic circumstances surrounding Brown Coleman’s death in September 1919 were uniquely intertwined with the fraternity’s legacy. Legend has it that Edna Brown held some of the first meetings in her living room before graduating at the top of her class from Howard University.
She met and fell in love with Frank Coleman, a founder of the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, and became pregnant, but died during childbirth, along with the baby. They were buried together.
The Colemans’ story has lived on ever since. A marriage between members of the two organizations is called a “Coleman Love” story. But the whereabouts of Edna’s burial site remained a mystery.
To find it, the fraternity turned to Marjorie Kinard, historian for the alumni chapter of Delta Sigma Theta in Washington, D.C., who first pledged as a student at the historically Black Livingstone College in the 1960s.
“When I hung up the phone, I immediately got to work,” she said.
Filled with wonder and excitement about her new assignment, Kinard quickly confirmed that Brown Coleman was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, a 50-acre cemetery in Washington.
Opened in 1895, Woodlawn contains approximately 36,000 burial sites, including many prominent black Americans, such as Blanche K. Bruce, a U.S. Senator from Mississippi from 1875 to 1881, and playwright and educator Mary Powell Burrill.
But when volunteers opened the gates so a small contingent of sorority sisters could find their ancestor, Kinard’s awe turned to fear. The grass was overgrown, with bushes and weeds that had not been mowed for months or even years. Some gravestones were scattered haphazardly.
Desecration is an unfortunate reality, as in the case of the Moses Macedonia African Cemetery in Bethesda, Maryland. Supporters of the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition are engaged in a legal battle to prevent a developer from selling the land on which the cemetery once stood. The case is being weighed in the Maryland Supreme Court.
In the town of Roslyn, New York, on Long Island, a librarian named Carol Clarke recently found the site where members of the Salem African Methodist Episcopal Church had been reburied after a wealthy family purchased a plot of land to build a chicken coop in 1899 . .
At Woodlawn, hidden beneath the bushes that covered Brown Coleman’s gravestone, it was revealed that the sorority founder’s full name was Mary Edna Brown Coleman.
It was soon discovered that two founders of the sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha – Sarah Meriwether Nutter and Marjorie Arizona Hill – were also buried at Woodlawn. Kinard contacted another student association leader and together they started the Woodlawn Collaborative Project, an initiative to ensure the site would never be neglected again.
“We were just happy that the cemetery was alive and well,” Kinard said.
___
Sands reported from Washington. AP reporter Curt Anderson contributed from Tampa, Florida.
___
Associated Press religion reporting is supported by the AP’s partnership with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.