City finds overlooked remains
Mayor: ‘Concerning’ discovery must be corrected
City and Metro officials have discovered 33 burial sites, including three that appear fully intact, near a historic Black cemetery on Lockwood Drive, which the city apparently missed when it tore through the site to expand the street in the 1940s and ’60s, Mayor Sylvester Turner said Monday.
The remains were discovered in the esplanade that was installed between the lanes during the Lockwood expansion, which split the Evergreen Negro Cemetery in two and caused it to languish until a nonprofit restored it in the 1990s. The Fifth Ward cemetery includes remains of Buffalo Soldiers, the first Black police officer killed in the line of duty, and World War I veterans.
Turner said it was a “concerning and disappointing” discovery. It was one thing, he said, for the city to desecrate the cemetery in the first place by running infrastructure directly through it in the mid-20th century, but it appears Houston officials and contractors also failed to account for all of the bodies that lay there. Now, he said, it is up to the city to right that wrong.
“We owe it to those who were buried here and, quite frankly, to those who have yet to come, to remember these families and give them a final resting place with dignity and respect,” Turner said. “It is unfortunate we are having to address this in 2023.”
A.K. Kelley, a former slave and prominent local businessman, opened the cemetery in Fifth Ward in 1887. Thought to be one of the founders of the Mount Zion Baptist Church, he died in 1928 and is buried in the family plot at the cemetery.
It operated through the 1960s. Rev. Harvey Clemons Jr., a Fifth Ward native, said his family has several ancestors buried there.
“Anyone who has grown up in Fifth Ward more than likely had family members who are buried here,” he said.
The city initially expanded Lockwood Drive in the 1940s, bisecting the cemetery. In the 1960s, it widened it further to include a median between the lanes at Market Street, Turner said. That work included moving hundreds of bodies and burial sites, and the city promised descendants it would move all of the bodies to the cemetery’s remaining sites.
Workers from the city and the Metropolitan Transit Authority
of Harris County found the remains as they prepared for work on the University Line, a new bus rapid transit route that will follow along much of Lockwood. The beginning stages of that work included an archaeological investigation, which led to the discovery.
Thirty of the 33 sites have what officials called “burial remnants” — coffin bottoms and other hardware, tiny fragments of bones — that indicate they were exhumed during the original work in the mid-20th century, said Mindy Bonine, a consultant from AmaTerra Environmental, who was the lead archaeological investigator on the project.
Three had “significant” remains, indicating they had been missed altogether and never exhumed or properly moved. Workers protected and reburied them until they could plan how to move them respectfully, Bonine said.
Turner said officials now will work with Project RESPECT, a nonprofit group that has worked since the 1990s to rehabilitate and maintain the historic cemetery, to do so. Metro Chairman Sanjay Ramabhadran said the transit agency would halt all work in the area, ensure the remains are respectfully moved and reinterred, and place a monument in the esplanade to recognize the significance of the site.
Dr. Woodrow Jones II, a mathematician and software engineer, and Lisa Jedkins, a computer programmer at Wilson Financial Group, have led Project RESPECT’s effort. The nonprofit also oversees Harrisburg-Jackson Cemetery in the East End, and the New Home Cemetery in Richmond.
The restoration involved pushing for legislative change in House Bill 814, which the Texas Legislature passed in 1995. That allowed nonprofits to petition for the responsibility of historic cemeteries. Then-Mayor Bob Lanier helped with the restoration efforts, as well, Jedkins said.
“This cemetery shows people who worked hard in this community,” Jedkins said. “This shows people who gave their lives in this community ... People don’t know in the 1800s, we were doctors, we were lawyers.”
Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis added: “These people went through being enslaved, they went through the era of racial terror. The least that we can do, after they have built, not just this country but Western civilization, is give them dignity of a decent place when they’re gone, because they damn sure didn’t have one when they were here.”