Historic black cemeteries seeking support from Virginia
RICHMOND, Virginia: John Mitchell picks his way down the path through the woods, avoiding the thick brush on either side, stepping gingerly over a slab of fallen granite, until he gets to the broken crypt.
A jagged hole exposes caskets to the sky, their metal fixtures rusted, covers ajar. English ivy cascades down the sides of the crypt, and a cross and a strange symbol have been drawn in black over the opening, possibly by someone who broke in.
The grave of Mitchell’s greatgrandfather, Thomas Mitchell, is somewhere nearby, hidden under vines and tree roots on the hillside. All around the violated crypt, mounds in the ivy mark fallen tombstones, piles of collapsed iron fencing, granite blocks that once outlined family plots.
This is Evergreen Cemetery, burial ground for some of the elite citizens of Richmond in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Bankers, publishers, doctors, lawyers - the type of upper crust who are usually lionised in this city of monuments. Except that all of these people were black, and the city’s grand cemeteries wouldn’t have them when they died.
Founded 126 years ago, the 60acre Evergreen has no ongoing means of support. Only a network of dedicated volunteers keeps it and the adjacent East End Cemetery from being erased by time and vegetation.
But help may be on the way, in a form that could offer hope to other African American cemeteries across Virginia in similar predicaments. A bill working its way through the General Assembly would set aside money for Evergreen and East End - just as the state already pays for the upkeep of thousands of Confederate graves statewide.
“They have been left out of the equation,” said Delare Delores McQuinn, who sponsored the bill. “We’ve got a whole laundry list of Confederate cemeteries and Revolutionary cemeteries that are given money every year. We’re not asking for anything out of the normal.”
Advocates say the effort is a symbolic first step that recognises a pressing issue and suggests how much needs to be done. Saving these two cemeteries will be a battle, but there are countless others in Virginia not covered by this measure that are as bad, or are forgotten, or that wouldn’t have anyone to keep them up even if money were available. But it has to start somewhere. “Sometimes symbolism is important in and of itself, even if it isn’t going to solve a problem completely,” said Lynn Rainville, a professor at Sweet Briar College and an expert on African-American cemeteries in Virginia. “Of all the ways to fight social injustice and all the things that we should or should not be doing today to right centuries of injustice, to me cemeteries are important - they are open-air museums of African American culture.”
Evergreen is the older and larger of the two cemeteries on the eastern edge of Richmond, situated on a hilltop with a noisy recycling centre on one side. A central area of Evergreen is cleared of trees, and the oldest section has been uncovered enough for some families to care for their plots.
It’s here that Evergreen’s most famous occupants are buried - including Maggie Walker, the first woman of any race to charter a bank in the United States, and John Mitchell Jr., a crusading newspaper editor who staged a protest over streetcar segregation as far back as 1904.
He is the namesake and greatgreat-uncle of the John Mitchell who was visiting on a recent day. At 53, Mitchell, a musician, has been coming to this cemetery his whole life and hearing stories about it from his father, who is now 100.
His dad used to brag about how they once paid “white folks” to keep up the graveyard. Finally, Mitchell figured out what he meant: “‘White Folks’ was actually a black guy who was very, very light-skinned - that was his nickname,” he said.
Other stories were about the glory days of black society, when Mitchell and Walker led rival banks and Richmond’s Jackson Ward section was known as the “Black Wall Street.” As a kid, Mitchell had to reconcile those tales with the condition of the cemetery: His uncle’s headstone had been stolen and the statue atop another family grave was toppled into the dirt.
His father “used to believe it was some type of initiation for some type of Confederate guys to actually desecrate that monument,” Mitchell said, pointing out that his namesake once crusaded against the Confederate statues on Monument Avenue. The family has since restored the gravestones.