Deerfield honors 300 souls of ‘Old Colored Cemetery’

After lying for decades in unmarked graves, hundreds of souls in Deerfield Beach finally will be memorialized.

A 3.3-acre plot, known on state maps only as the “Old Colored Cemetery,” became the final resting place for as many as 300 blacks — a Union soldier, veterans of both world wars and a freed slave among them.

Now, with a newly awarded $400,000 state grant, Deerfield Beach plans to honor them all and erect a memorial park in the field on the southwest corner of Southeast Second Avenue and Fourth Street.

“My hope is that by creating a beautiful and lasting memorial park, it will start the healing process for those in the community whose loved ones were so disrespected,” Mayor Bill Ganz said.

The cemetery, which dates to the 1800s, came close to being bulldozed when a developer in 2015 won city approval to build

“That’s history there. You can’t pretend it didn’t happen just because it’s grass and dirt there now. They can use it to educate students.” Laura Lucas, genealogist

townhouses there over the protests of Deerfield Beach’s African-American community.

Archaeological studies in 1986 and 2005 did not come up with conclusive evidence that bodies still were there.

Some city officials believed the bodies had been moved to nearby Pineview Cemetery after a developer purchased the land in the 1970s and bulldozed the markers. To satisfy critics, the city and the developer agreed to do a third archaeological study before the townhouses were built.

That’s when gold-capped teeth and skull fragments turned up, and the townhouse project was canceled.

A chain-link fence now encircles the lot, which had been a churchyard. People were buried there from 1897 to 1937, with some burials perhaps as late as the 1940s, records show. At that time, the deceased could not have been buried in any other graveyard in Deerfield. Segregation kept the races separate — even in death.

Department of Defense records helped show who might be lying there. Many of the dead were Bahamians. Most of the cemetery’s dead listed their occupations as “farmer,” “laborer” or “domestic.” The vast majority died in their 30s or 40s.

Laura Lucas, a Pompano Beach genealogist who has an aunt and cousins buried at the cemetery, volunteered to comb through records to find out who might be buried in the field. She said it would be “an atrocity” if the lot just east of Dixie Highway were to have remained as is.

“That’s history there,” she said. “You can’t pretend it didn’t happen just because it’s grass and dirt there now.”

The burials in the old churchyard stopped when Pineview, a city-owned cemetery, opened in the 1950s, according to the Rev. Theodus Times, whose family has been burying Deerfield’s dead since 1954.

After that, a succession of developers bought the churchyard, and some city leaders thought the bodies had been moved.

But Velemina Williams, 82, never believed her aunt and grandmother had been relocated.

“I’m just waiting to see what they are going to do,” Williams said of the plans for the memorial site.

Lucas and Times, a funeral director at his family’s business, Rahming-Poitier Funeral Home, developed a list of 300 names of people they say probably were buried in the cemetery.

They cross-checked state death records with records from a West Palm Beach funeral home that buried members of Deerfield Beach’s black community from the late 1800s until the mid-20th century.

Among those identified: Violet King, who died in 1919 after being born a slave 75 years earlier in “Old Virginia,” according to records Lucas found.

The townhouse building plan was scaled back to an adjacent lot. And the developer and the city joined forces to persuade the state to lend a hand. The state in 2016 allocated a $995,000 payment to the developer, who reduced the number of townhouses for “Village Park.”

The site soon will be known as Branhilda Richardson Knowles Memorial Park, in honor of a city midwife who was born in the Bahamas and attended many deliveries from the turn of the century to the late 1950s. Many babies Knowles helped deliver couldn’t be born in segregated hospitals.

The request for the state to fund the memorial park was sponsored by Rep. Bobby DuBose, D-Fort Lauderdale, after the city filled out a grant application.

Commissioner Gloria Battle, who was in the minority on the City Commission with Ganz against developing the site in 2015, said she kept hoping the state would appropriate the money for the memorial park this year. Her greatgrandfather, a Bahamian native, was buried there.

Battle expects a design to be unveiled and construction to begin this fall.

“One idea we had was for something like the Vietnam Memorial with all the names of the people we know are buried there,” she said.

The memorial could become a teaching tool — Deerfield Beach Middle School is just a few blocks from the site, Lucas said.

If done correctly, “they can actually use it to educate students … about these people who were pioneers,” she said.

ANNE GEGGIS/STAFF The 3.3-acre plot became the final resting place for as many as 300 blacks. The plan to build townhouses there was scaled back to an adjacent lot.