For the forgotten African-American dead

To get to East End Cemetery in Henrico County, Virginia, an abandoned African-American graveyard, my wife, Erin, and I drive through a predominantly black Richmond neighborhood — our neighborhood. Decades of neglect have turned this once beautiful burial ground into woodland. We’re part of a volunteer effort that has reclaimed about two and a half of East End’s 16 acres since it began in 2013.

Thick, tangled vegetation has swallowed headstones and grave markers. The chest-high spring and summer growth is gone or going, so we’re left with the year-round die-hards that have grown every which way over the decades — English ivy, brambles, privet. Chinese sumac sprouts everywhere and has grown tree-high and treethick, competing with and winning against cedar and oak. Beneath it, we find pockets of illegally dumped trash. We also find headstones, fragments and corners of which Erin spots beneath the carpet of ivy. I tend to find them with my feet, by tripping over them.

Even sections we call “clear” will look scruffy and forlorn to people accustomed to manicured cemeteries. There is no lawn, just a patchwork — weeds, dead brown leaves, bare earth. Headstones are cracked, askew, even shattered, by nature or by vandals. Encroaching tree roots have buckled and broken concrete curbs that once enclosed family plots.

Before we take the first of two turns to enter East End and Evergreen — an adjacent African-American cemetery that is just as overgrown and almost three times as large — we pass a neatly landscaped graveyard, the Confederate Section of Oakwood Cemetery. Oakwood is owned by the city of Richmond; this particular section, however, gets an extra helping of taxpayer money from the state Legislature every year. In fact, dozens of Confederate cemeteries across the state have been receiving such allotments, for roughly 100 years.

The cash goes to private entities like the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Stonewall Confederate Memorial Association through the Virginia Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. From 2007 to mid-2016, Virginia’s General Assembly handed the Daughters more than $700,000.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy was founded in the 1890s on the twin myths of the tragic yet noble Lost Cause of the Confederacy and the happy black folks who just loved them some slavery. That my tax dollars flow into their coffers doesn’t sit well with this descendant of enslaved people who escaped the Confederacy and fought for the United States in the Civil War — in the waning days of the conflict, my great-grandfather Mat liberated himself from a farm in Goochland County, Virginia, and joined the 115th Infantry Regiment of the United States Colored Troops. He signed up here in Richmond. My great-grandmother Julia’s family escaped Gloucester County, Virginia, for Union-held territory in York County. the South, Dr. Michael Trinkley, an archaeologist who works with the Chicora Foundation, told me. But “you can’t have the history of the South without having the history of African-Americans.”

There are abandoned and neglected historic African-American cemeteries across the South and the country as a whole. In a 2015 story in The Nation, my colleague Seth the Bowsers and the Walkers.

There’s a longer, more accurate answer that begins with a core fact: The roots of today’s neglect are in Jim Crow. Black Richmonders suffered from a withering assault on their political rights, economic opportunities and dignity that was initiated — resumed, really — by the white elite after Reconstruction. Central to this attack was the theft of suffrage through a series of laws that created nearly insurmountable barriers to blacks — and many poor whites — hoping to exercise their 15th Amendment rights. By the early 1900s, 90 percent of black men had been cut from voting rolls.

Jim Crow drove many black people from their neighborhoods, some away from the city, and many into poverty. And while white supremacy was not as brutal in Virginia as it was in the Deep South, lynching did happen. Joseph McCoy was murdered by a mob in Alexandria in 1897, the year East End opened. A little terror goes a long way.

Contrast this with Confederate cemeteries around the state. Privately owned Hollywood Cemetery appears to receive little — if any — taxpayer support now. But go back a century and you’ll see its owners got a leg up from their brothers in the General Assembly. In 1914, after years of annual payments to Confederate groups, the Legislature appropriated $8,000 to provide perpetual care for Hollywood’s Confederate graves. That’s $190,000 in 2016 dollars.

Other states have practiced their own forms of preferential treatment. When creating its Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Alabama approved up to $25,000 a year, for “any committee of citizens” wanting to erect a Confederate monument or to supplement funds raised by organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Mississippi’s state code allows county boards of supervisors to donate money to locate and care for graves and graveyards of “Confederate soldiers or sailors who died in the Confederate service” and to purchase “land on which any of the said graveyards may be situated.”

I have found no law that authorizes similar annual funding for the graves and graveyards of people enslaved in the former Confederate States of America. Virginia’s would be the first — if the General Assembly does the right thing and passes House Bill 1547.