Once-abandoned Black cemetery kept alive in Fifth Ward
Woodrow Jones II stood at the corner of Market Street and Carroll Oliver Way in Fifth Ward looking at the historic Evergreen Negro Cemetery, which sits on a busy stretch of Lockwood Drive between a Shell gas station and a State Farm insurance office.
“You see all of these trees in here? Every one of these trees, every tree out here, I planted myself,” he said, pointing to the crepe myrtles that border the cemetery.
Despite its bustling surroundings, the Evergreen Negro Cemetery imparts a sense of serenity once a visitor sets foot inside. Small trees and shrubs are smartly arranged among scores of gray and white tombstones, some of which have chain links engraved at the top to mark the resting places of former slaves. Here lie Buffalo Soldiers, World War veterans and Fifth Ward community leaders who made the neighborhood a nexus for Houston’s Black population more than 100 years ago.
But Evergreen Negro Cemetery may as well have been a forest when Jones first visited in the early 1990s. The grounds were overgrown with trees so dense they left little room to walk, and the tombstones were buried under decades’ worth of vegetation, forgotten and invisible.
The city of Houston had torn through the cemetery decades earlier to expand Lockwood, displacing hundreds of buried bodies and splitting the burial ground in two. The cemetery had languished ever since.
In came Jones, 77, a mathematician and early software engineer who was developing a program to help cemeteries map their grounds with Lisa Jedkins, a computer programmer at Wilson Financial Group, which owned several Black funeral homes at the time. Together they formed Project RESPECT, a group dedicated to the preservation of neglected and abandoned cemeteries, most of
which hold Black, Latino and Indigenous people.
“These cemeteries tell the story of the people, how they lived and what they did,” Jedkins said. “There are Buffalo Soldiers, there are former slaves, there are many people who built Houston in this cemetery. So it’s not even about the cemetery, it’s about the individuals in the cemetery that tell our story and our history.”
The problem of decaying cemeteries is bigger than one might expect. While most states, including Texas, have laws restricting development on established burial sites, there is nothing that requires a public body to actually maintain an abandoned cemetery.
Their upkeep then falls to private companies or nonprofits, such as Project RESPECT, which oversees three historically Black cemeteries in the Houston area: Harrisburg-Jackson Cemetery in the East End, New Home Cemetery near Richmond and Evergreen Negro Cemetery in Fifth Ward.
The Descendants of Olivewood, for example, carried out a similar revival of Olivewood Cemetery, the city’s oldest Black cemetery in 2008.
Thousands of such cemeteries are thought to exist in Texas alone, many of which are not registered as established burial grounds. It’s a common enough phenomenon that local groups such as the Texas Freedom Colonies Project invite residents to submit cemetery findings to a database called the Texas African American Cemetery Registry.
With no one obligated to care for them, these cemeteries often fall into disrepair.
‘Can’t just wait’
A.K. Kelley opened the Evergreen Negro Cemetery in 1887. A former slave and prominent local businessman and philanthropist, Kelley is also thought to have been one of the founders of the historic Mount Zion Baptist Church, according to the Texas State Historical Association. He died in 1928 and is buried in the family plot at Evergreen.
The nearly 6-acre cemetery stopped accepting new burials in 1950 and quickly fell into disrepair after the city expanded Lockwood through the cemetery in 1960, the historical association said. Nearly 500 bodies were exhumed to make room for the expansion.
Local businessman Mack Hannah Jr. enlisted Project RESPECT to lead a restoration effort of Evergreen Negro Cemetery after a young woman was raped there in 1992, hidden among the overgrowth. The cemetery was no longer an eyesore, it was a danger to the community.
There was just one problem: Because Project RESPECT was not the cemetery’s legal caretaker, it could not break ground on the massive undertaking that such a restoration would require. So rather than demur, the group simply had the law changed.
It succeeded in lobbying the Texas Legislature in 1995 to pass House Bill 814, which allows nonprofits to petition for the responsibility of a historic cemetery.
Project RESPECT set to work organizing volunteers and soliciting help from
groups who might bankroll the project. Conoco Phillips lent equipment used to rip out dozens of trees that were crowding the cemetery. Local volunteers cleaned up the grounds, while Rice University professors and students used ground radar technology to help find lost gravesites.
Twenty-seven years later, the work continues. Jones and Jedkins accept help from volunteers like college sororities and local church groups whenever possible, and Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis sends a crew to mow the lawn every two weeks.
“This isn’t just preserving Black history. This is Houston and U.S. history that’s worth protecting,” Ellis said in a statement.
Much of the upkeep, though— at Evergreen and the other cemeteries — still falls to Jones.
Jones travels up from Galveston, where he now lives, at least once a week to walk around Evergreen with an iron rod, poking it into the ground in search of unmarked graves. He spends hours at it and has found two new gravesites in a matter of weeks. One of them was outside the boundaries of where the cemetery is supposed to end.
“Those houses are probably sitting on graves,” he said, pointing to a row of bungalows on Stonewall Street with backyards abutting the cemetery.
On a cold January day, the odd beer bottle or bag of chips could be seen floating around the grounds, but for the most part, the cemetery was clean and well kept. One could almost tune out the heavy traffic cruising down Lockwood.
“Somebody has to have a vision to do it, you can’t just wait on somebody else,” Jones said.
But even Jones has his limits. Farther down Carroll Oliver Way, about three blocks south of Evergreen Negro Cemetery, is a vast, empty lot that Jones said is also an abandoned Black cemetery. On days when the grass is cut, Jones said you can see headstones peeking out from under the ground, but today, the brush came up to his waist.
Jones ducked under a chain locking the fence and tromped a couple yards through the grass, coming to a halt in a small clearing. He’d love to try to salvage this cemetery, too, but the task is monumental, and there’s only so much time in a day.
“I have more than I can handle,” Jones said. “Sometimes, you just have to let go of the ones you can’t do anything with.”
‘Where it all began’
For longtime residents of Fifth Ward, the cemetery’s rebirth has been something of a godsend.
“This cemetery is something that we vastly needed a lot of eyes on, it’s a part of our history that’s important to maintain in a community that is gentrifying,” said Joetta Stevenson, a lifelong Fifth Ward resident and president of the Fifth Ward Super Neighborhood.
“People are going to come here and tour Buffalo Bayou, but they need to take some other rides and come into a historic part of our community so we can show them that these were our beginnings, and they’re very important to us,” Stevenson said.
Project RESPECT hopes to further incorporate the people of Fifth Ward through its ongoing genealogy project, compiling a database of people buried in Evergreen Negro Cemetery and sharing it with the community so residents can search for ancestors who may be buried there.
Jedkins also runs another nonprofit to that end called Why Not Legacy & Heritage, which, among other things, aims to help connect marginalized people to their ancestral heritage.
Jones, for his part, wants to be buried at Evergreen himself when the time comes. It’s no longer an active cemetery, but he hopes an exception can be made.
“This is where it all began for me,” Jones says.