Neglected black cemeteries deserve the same level of care others get

Both East End and Evergreen Cemetery, which lies in the city of Richmond, were established because “white” cemeteries wouldn’t accept black burials. Neither benefits from the Virginia Legislature’s largess. In fact, state, county and city agencies have spent years studiously ignoring these deteriorating African-American historic sites.

There are small signs that this is changing. In June 2016, the Virginia Outdoors Foundation, a quasi-state agency set up to preserve open spaces, awarded East End and Evergreen a $400,000 grant. Most of the funds will go toward purchasing the properties and legal costs, so other money must be found to sustain the restoration.

Bills introduced in the General Assembly to provide any funds to save historic African-American cemeteries in Virginia have died — or been killed — in committee. Later this month, when the Legislature opens its 45-day session, Virginia’s lawmakers will have another chance to get on the right side of history. On Dec. 29, Delores McQuinn, a Democratic state delegate from Richmond, introduced House Bill 1547, drafted in collaboration with the administration of Gov. Terry McAuliffe. Beginning in 2018, it would allot roughly $35,000 a year to preserve historical graves and cemeteries “of African-Americans who lived at any time between January 1, 1800, and January 1, 1900.” The appropriation would become part of the Code of Virginia, just like the Confederate graves provision.

“These cemeteries hold some of the iconic leaders of the past who in many ways have never been given their due honor,” McQuinn told me. Funds have been earmarked for Revolutionary War and Confederate graves, which “deserve that honor and attention,” she said. “This is just extending it to sites that have been left out of the equation.” The amount of the appropriation is quite small. The symbolism, however, is huge.

East End and Evergreen are the only cemeteries identified so far as potential recipients of this aid, which would go to vetted nonprofits.

“Nobody has ever really looked at how many African-American cemeteries there are” in Virginia or across Freed Wessler traced the decline of Greenwood Cemetery in St. Louis County, Missouri, where a volunteer cleanup effort collapsed for lack of government or institutional support.

We have seen at least one success story, a collaboration between members of the St. John A Baptist Church, local colleges and other community groups that restored and now care for South Asheville Cemetery in North Carolina. It’s a beautiful but tiny cemetery, a fraction of the combined acreage of East End and Evergreen.

Great women and men are buried at East End and Evergreen, as great as any of the Confederate souls at rest in Oakwood — or those honored with imposing statues along Richmond’s Monument Avenue. Many Richmonders know of Maggie L. Walker, the first African-American female bank president. She is buried at Evergreen with members of her family. A few know of John Mitchell Jr., buried at Evergreen with his mother, Rebecca. At the turn of the 20th century, Mitchell built The Richmond Planet into one of the nation’s most progressive black newspapers, and later served on the City Council. Next to no one knows about Rosa D. Bowser, an educator and suffragist, or Richard F. Tancil, a doctor and bank president. Both are buried at East End. Mitchell, Tancil, Bowser — and so many others at rest in these burial grounds — were born enslaved.

People often ask me how these cemeteries got so bad. Why can’t they be like the Confederate Section of Oakwood or Hollywood Cemetery, the immaculate burial ground of thousands of Confederate soldiers? The subtext is: Why can’t black people take care of their own stuff?

One short and incomplete answer is that many people moved away. Others lost their connection to the cemetery and their forebears — or simply couldn’t find their loved ones beneath the foliage. The current and former owners of both cemeteries, which had no perpetual-care funds, have given up on the properties.

But a precious few folks do maintain their plots — descendants of the Knights, the Taylors, the Jonathans,