Movement to preserve heritage of Black cemeteries gains strength
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 over many decades.
In the past few years, growing awareness and the discovery of graves underneath parking lots, schools and even an Air Force base have spurred preservation efforts among state and local governments as well as community members who want to rebuild ancestral links that are spiritually crucial.
In Washington, D.C., members of a historically Black sorority recruited an expert who helped find the 1919 burial site of one of the sorority’s founders, hidden from view in an overgrown, badly neglected section of Woodlawn Cemetery.
In Miami, Jessie Wooden bought a historically segregated Black cemetery also suffering from neglect. He and his brother, Frank — who works as caretaker — have a powerful motive for trying to restore the cemetery: it houses the gravesite of their mother, Vivian, who died when Jessie was an infant.
“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 sites of sacred cultural memory are desecrated, it adds additional trauma to the indignity of being segregated even in death, Brent Leggs said. He is executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and senior vice president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
REFLECTION AND COMMEMORATION
Those groups have played major roles in bringing awareness to the threats to cemetery preservation, such as vandalism, abandonment, ownership disputes and development. The groups provide technical expertise, as well as legal and preservation advocacy.
“There’s growing awareness among the public that cemeteries are not these haunted, scary places, but they are parks to be experienced as sites of reflection and commemoration,” 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 are weeding, cleaning and repainting crypts, some dating to the late 19th century.
After Jessie Wooden serendipitously met an aunt when he was in his late 40s and learned about his mother’s resting place, he tried to visit but found the vast graveyard overgrown, snake-infested and surrounded by debris.
Now, when he comes to work, he walks past the crypts and spreading banyan trees to pray at his mother’s grave.
“All my life I didn’t know her. All I knew that mom was gone,” Wooden said. “For me to be able to come where she’s resting at and be able to just to say a little prayer and talk to her, oh, that means so much to me.”
Marvin Dunn, emeritus professor at Florida International University and historian of race relations in Florida, remembers childhood visits to his great-grandmother’s grave for yearly spring cleanups, when he helped out marking the site with Coke bottles.
“It was the ritual,” Dunn said. “My grandmother, especially, would not have allowed that grave not to be cleaned once a year.”
‘PART OF OUR SOULS’
Dunn’s greatgrandmother’s burial grounds belonged to a church, and those cemeteries have been 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 to no objection — leading to hundreds of thousands of Black graves that might never be found again.
“Where we bury our dead remains a part of our history, a part of our lives, a part of our souls,” Dunn said. “Not knowing where your ancestors are at, 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 ongoing to ensure funding. Last year, Florida passed a bill to fund restoration of historic Black cemeteries. Dunn said the state should also help families gain access to privately owned graveyards.
“Dignity is the biggest thing,” said Antoinette Jackson, a University of South Florida professor. She leads the African American Burial Ground & Remembering Project in the Tampa area, where Black cemeteries were discovered in recent years under a corporation’s parking lot and a school’s campus.
USE OF RADAR
Elsewhere in Tampa, an estimated 800 graves of Black people remain from the Zion Cemetery, founded in 1901 as the city’s first burial ground for Blacks. The Tampa Housing Authority is redeveloping a housing complex built atop some of the graves, said Leroy Moore, the authority’s chief operating officer.
Use of groundpenetrating radar confirmed the graves’ location, leading to closure of five buildings over the burial ground, relocation of 32 families and efforts to preserve the area and create a genealogy research center.
“You’ve got to know your history,” Moore said.
In Miami, the Wooden brothers are trying to restore those family and community ties one crumbling gravesite at a time.
“People can be proud, you know, where their loved ones are buried at. And they can be … proud to come and visit again,” Jessie Wooden said as Frank painstakingly brushed dirt off a nearby crypt. “We’re open, we’re visiting, we’re burying, I mean, we’re getting things done.”