Enslavement and segregation denied people property and ancestry. But much here appears to turn on inheritance and title: Who owns these graveyards? Who owns these bones? Who owns, and what is owed?
TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA – The Testerina Primitive Baptist Church sits at 5520 Miccosukee Road in Tallahassee, Fla. on March 15, 2022. The New Hope Cemetery, where the enslaved people were buried, is located behind the church in the woods. (Lawren Simmons/Fresh Take Florida)
“Historically, African American cemeteries were not subject to regulations, upkeeping and other necessary efforts to uphold the dignity of the deceased, compared to their counterparts,” she added. “Moreover, the lands on which African-American cemeteries were contained, at times, were sold without any regard to who was buried there.”
For over 25 years, Gloria Jefferson Anderson researched her father’s side of the family, trying to figure out what happened to her ancestors once slavery ended. “When I found out where my father’s people were on the plantation – the next question was, ‘Well, where are these people buried?” said Anderson, 74, a Tallahassee resident.
Anderson’s quest for her past led her to New Hope Cemetery in Tallahassee, a historic African-American burial ground believed to hold the graves of former slaves from Welaunee and Fleischmann plantations in Leon County. This site, where no graves are marked and there are no headstones, is located behind Testerina Primitive Baptist Church, which Anderson had coincidentally been attending her whole life, along with many of her neighbors.
In recent years, forgotten, neglected and abandoned Black cemeteries have begun to receive more attention. Across the United States, many unmarked African American graveyards have been rediscovered – often hidden under more recently built parking lots, schools and housing complexes.
“I came home and I looked at my father’s picture and cried,” Anderson recalled about her father, Fred Jefferson, in an interview. “I said, ‘Dad, I’ve found your people.’”
CLEARWATER, FLORIDA – Uncovering Black cemeteries paved over in Florida | 60 Minutes In the 1950s, in Clearwater, Florida, near Greenwood, Black cemeteries were supposed to be relocated for various development projects. But many graves were never relocated and the cemeteries were paved over.
In the first half of the 20th century, Clearwater Heights was a Black neighborhood — thriving, proud and anchored by faith.
Eleanor Breland: Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, Bethany C.M.E., and New Zion Missionary Baptist Church were all located on the Heights.
And so is St. Matthews Baptist, where we heard stories of childhood in the Heights, including those of Diane Stephens and Eleanor Breland.
NORTH CAROLINA – At least fifteen hundred people who did all sorts of things are buried in Geer Cemetery, including Deidre Barnes’s great-grandfather, a grandson of Jesse Geer, a plantation owner in Durham, North Carolina who sold two acres of land to three Black freedmen in 1877. Gonzalez-Garcia and her team have been painstakingly reconstructing the cemetery’s population from its two hundred surviving headstones and from burial cards recorded by the W.P.A. in the nineteen-thirties.
“Oh, it’s a cemetery.” A few years ago, Barnes read in the newspaper that the place was called Geer. “My grandmother’s maiden name is Geer,” she told me. “And so I asked her, ‘Do we have people buried there?’ ”
“The people who started White Rock Baptist Church and St. Joseph’s A.M.E.,” Barnes told me, “they’re buried here.” She and Gonzalez-Garcia seemed to know each epitaph, telling story after story about African American families who thrived in the early years after Reconstruction—getting college degrees, starting businesses—only to lose most of their gains to segregation and swindles
In the Jim Crow South, Black people paid taxes that went to building and erecting Confederate monuments. They buried their own dead with the help of mutual-aid societies, fraternal organizations, and insurance policies. Cemeteries work on something like a pyramid scheme: payments for new plots cover the cost of maintaining old ones. Durham’s other Black cemeteries were run right over. “Hickstown’s part of the freeway,” Gonzalez-Garcia told me, counting them off. “Violet Park is a church parking lot.
The Abandoned and Historic Cemeteries bill — House Bill 49 — by Democrat Fentrice Driskell of Tampa has sailed through its committees with bipartisan support. It awaits a final vote on the House floor.
GROVELAND, FLORIDA – The Groveland is working with a nearly $500,000 state grant to restore it. Pillars and a wall are going up. There’ll be markers for all the graves, an educational kiosk, a children’s corner, a winding path, and a veterans corner, too.
TAMPA, FLORIDA – In Tampa, archaeologists confirmed in 2019 that a historic African-American cemetery’s graves had not been not exhumed before the land was developed. Under some warehouses, public housing and a tow lot remained the burial sites of Zion Cemetery.
Zion has received a lot of media attention and action from local officials seeking to safeguard the graves and honor those buried there, but New Hope Cemetery — virtually in the state Legislature’s backyard, only seven miles from the Capitol — has received far less.
Last year, Gov. Ron Desantis approved the creation of the Task Force for Abandoned Florida Cemeteries, which held public meetings around the state during the summer and fall to produce a 200-page report earlier this year. Sen. Janet Cruz said last year that there are nearly 3,000 abandoned African-American cemeteries in Florida that have not yet been identified, according to estimates by state archaeologists.
“It’s sad to say that we were forgotten people, and that’s basically what transpired in many African-American cemeteries back at home,” Hart said. Like Jefferson, Driskell recognizes the power of knowing your own history.
“I think one of the great things about this is we can all understand heritage,” Driskell said. “We can all understand how important it is to understand where you came from and the importance of the sanctity of the dead.”
ALBANY, NEW YORK – In Albany, a graveyard not on any map was found in 2005, on the onetime plantation of a cousin of Philip Schuyler, Alexander Hamilton’s father-in-law. It held the bodies of African-descended people, mainly children and babies, all buried before 1790. Cordell Reaves, who is African American, was working for the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation when he learned about the Albany remains. Those bones went to the New York State Museum for analysis. In 2015, it finally came together: a Catholic cemetery donated plots; woodworkers built coffins, and artists and schoolchildren decorated them. The dead lay in state in the front hall of Schuyler Mansion before the multi-faith burial, in one of the best attended and most moving public-history events the state has ever hosted.
PHILADELPHIA, PA. – During the years when Morton was collecting skulls, much of Philadelphia’s African American community was burying its dead in a cemetery on Queen Street that’s now a playground called Weccacoe, for a Lenni Lenape word that means “peaceful place.” The day I stopped there, the playground was a tumble of sippy cups and strollers, water buckets and tubes of sunscreen, and toddlers playing pirates. Underneath lie thousands of graves.
Pennsylvania passed a gradual abolition law in 1780, and by the seventeen-nineties Philadelphia had a thriving free Black community, much of it centered on what is now the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1810, the Bethel church trustees and the A.M.E.’s founder, Richard Allen, bought a city block on Queen Street. Until 1864, the congregation used the land as a burial ground and then, in 1889, strapped for cash, sold it to cover the cost of a new church. The burial ground became a park, and then a playground. Nearly half the city’s population is Black, but the city’s monuments and museums mostly commemorate Benjamin Franklin, the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, and the drafting of the Constitution. Avenging the Ancestors, a coalition formed in 2002 to advocate for a slavery memorial in the city, has taken a broad view of the notion of a descendant community, describing its members as “today’s free Black sons and daughters” of “yesterday’s enslaved Black fathers and mothers.”
JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA – Once considered an extension of the Colored Manhattan Beach, now Hanna Park, in 2009, Jacksonville Beach cemetery made plans to add a vault for cremation urns…
“It’s going to be a beautiful site,” said City Manager George Forbes.The city will also install a monument for unnamed people buried in what was once known as the Jacksonville Beach “colored cemetery.” The cemetery contains the graves of many black people who lived in South Pablo Beach, one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods. But some of them were buried outside what is now identified as the cemetery’s boundaries. Cremation has been growing in use because it can be significantly cheaper than a burial plot and saves land.
Another cemetery was recently identified on the site of Jacksonville University. Nestled along the bluffs of the St. John’s River, adjacent to the schools main entrance rest a ‘vacant lot’ surrounded by a white picket fence where Spanish Land grants once marked and extension of Ana Kingsley’s estate.
In 1860, a Post Office opened in Oakland, and closed in 1867. During the Civil War, the Post Office at Oakland was the only one operating within the present-day boundaries of Orange County, as Orlando’s was closed from 1861 to 1866. Established in 1882, Oakland Post Office reopened in 1877. During a time of great growth in the region during the 1880s, Oakland emerged as the center of commerce in west Orange County. It appeared that the village would blossom into a city, with the town incorporating in 1887. Betty Wade grew up in Oakland. She learned road construction was threatening to encroach on the land where her family members and other Black people had been buried from 1882 through the 1940s.
“The Turnpike Authority was gonna claim some land as imminent domain and we didn’t want that to happen,” Wade said.
However, a fire in the business district and a subsequent period of freezes in rapid succession throughout the 1890s, along with the growth of nearby Winter Garden, seemed to ensure that Oakland would remain as little more than a sleepy village. In 1940, Oakland surpassed nearby Maitland in Population, ranking at #6 in the county. In 1950, however, Oakland fell back to #7, with a population of 545, the majority of whom were black.[7]
Located at 16798 W. Colonial Drive, the cemetery was established in 1882 with burials continuing through the 1940s. Oakland founder James Gamble Speer gave the original deed to three Black trustees in 1917. It was later deeded to the Town of Oakland in 2014. The site was saved from development in the area thanks to combined efforts by the Town and a group of descendants who rallied to raise awareness, clear underbrush, and conduct archaeological work.
A 2005 study based on vital statistics shows that cremations occur in about 32 percent of deaths nationwide and that Florida had the second-largest number of cremations, at roughly 51 percent of deaths, according to the Cremation Association of North America.The cemetery improvements will take place on property the city bought for the realignment of North and South Penman roads, not far from a new wrought-iron cemetery entrance.
“There is no place that you and I can go to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves,” she said. No marker or plaque, no museum or statue. “There’s not even a tree scored, an initial that I can visit, or you can visit, in Charleston or Savannah or New York or Providence or better still on the banks of the Mississippi.” – Toni Morrison
Originally published March 2nd, 2022 – NPR
