MIAMI (AP) 鈥 Neglect, abandonment and destruction have been the fate of thousands of segregated cemeteries across the country where African Americans 鈥 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, and even an 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鈥檚 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 鈥 who works as caretaker 鈥 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.
鈥淲hen we got here it looked like a jungle,鈥 Frank Wooden said. 鈥淪ome people had to jump the fence to get in to see their loved one.鈥
When sites of sacred cultural memory are desecrated, it adds additional trauma to the indignity of being segregated even in death, said Brent Leggs. He is executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and senior vice president of the 好色tv Trust for Historic Preservation.
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.
鈥淭here鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 grave.
鈥淎ll my life I didn鈥檛 know her. All I knew that mom was gone,鈥 Wooden said. 鈥淔or me to be able to come where she鈥檚 resting at and be able to just to say a little prayer and talk to her, oh, that means so much to me.鈥
Marvin Dunn, emeritus professor at Florida International University and historian of race relations in Florida, remembers childhood visits to his great-grandmother鈥檚 grave for yearly spring clean-ups, when he helped out marking the site with Coke bottles.
鈥淚t was the ritual,鈥 Dunn said. 鈥淢y grandmother, especially, would not have allowed that grave not to be cleaned once a year.鈥
Dunn鈥檚 great-grandmother鈥檚 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 鈥 leading to hundreds of thousands of Black graves that might never be found again.
鈥淲here we bury our dead remains a part of our history, a part of our lives, a part of our souls,鈥 Dunn said. 鈥淣ot knowing where your ancestors are at, you can鈥檛 have that connection ... And that鈥檚 a tragic loss.鈥
In 2022, Congress passed the African-American Burial Grounds Preservation Act as a program within the 好色tv Park Service; efforts are ongoing to . Last year, Florida passed a bill to fund restoration of historic Black cemeteries. Dunn says the state should also help families gain access to privately owned graveyards.
鈥淒ignity is the biggest thing,鈥 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鈥檚 parking lot and a school鈥檚 campus.
Elsewhere in Tampa, an estimated 800 graves of Black people remain from the Zion Cemetery, founded in 1901 as the city鈥檚 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鈥檚 chief operating officer.
Use of ground-penetrating radar confirmed the graves鈥 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.
鈥淵ou鈥檝e got to know your history,鈥 Moore said.
In Miami, the Wooden brothers are trying to restore those family and community ties one crumbling gravesite at a time.
鈥淧eople can be proud, you know, where their loved ones are buried at. And they can be 鈥 proud to come and visit again,鈥 Jessie Wooden said as Frank painstakingly brushed dirt off a nearby crypt. 鈥淲e鈥檙e open, we鈥檙e visiting, we鈥檙e burying, I mean, we鈥檙e getting things done.鈥
In Washington, in the summer of 2018, members of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority were trying to get things done 鈥 namely to locate the final resting place of one of its 22 founding members, Edna Brown Coleman.
The tragic circumstances of Brown Coleman鈥檚 death in September 1919 had been uniquely woven into the sorority鈥檚 legacy. According to its lore, Edna Brown held some of the first meetings in her living room before graduating from Howard University at the top of her class.
She met and fell in love with Frank Coleman, a founder of the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, and became pregnant, but died while giving birth, along with the baby. They were buried together.
Since then, the Colemans鈥 story has lived on. A marriage between members of the two organizations is dubbed a 鈥淐oleman Love鈥 story. But the whereabouts of Edna鈥檚 burial site remained a mystery.
To find it, the sorority tapped Marjorie Kinard, resident historian of Washington, D.C.鈥檚 alumni chapter of Delta Sigma Theta who first pledged as a student at historically Black Livingstone College in the 1960s.
鈥淲hen I hung up the phone, I got right on it,鈥 she said.
Filled with wonder and excitement at her new assignment, Kinard quickly confirmed that Brown Coleman was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery, a 22.5-acre cemetery in Washington.
Opened in 1895, Woodlawn contains about 36,000 burial sites, many of them , such as Blanche K. Bruce, a U.S. Senator from Mississippi from 1875 to 1881, and playwright and educator Mary Powell Burrill.
But once volunteers opened the gates for a small contingent of sorority members to find their forebear, Kinard鈥檚 awe turned to dread. The grass was overgrown, with shrubbery and weeds that hadn鈥檛 been cut in months, or even years. Some tombstones were strewn about haphazardly.
Desecration is an unfortunate reality, such as in the case of Moses Macedonia African Cemetery in Bethesda, Maryland. Advocates of the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition are mired in a legal battle to keep a developer from selling the land on which the cemetery once stood. The case is .
In the town of Roslyn, New York, on Long Island, a librarian named Carol Clarke where members of the Salem African Methodist Episcopal Church had been reinterred after a wealthy family purchased a plot of land to build a chicken coop in 1899.
At Woodlawn, hidden beneath the shrubbery overgrown over Brown Coleman鈥檚 tombstone was the revelation that the sorority founder鈥檚 full name was Mary Edna Brown Coleman.
Soon it was discovered that two founders of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority -- Sarah Meriwether Nutter and Marjorie Arizona Hill 鈥 were also interred at Woodlawn. Kinard reached out to another sorority leader, and together they began Woodlawn Collaborative Project, an initiative designed to ensure that the grounds are never again neglected.
鈥淲e were just happy that the cemetery was alive and well,鈥 Kinard said.
___
Sands reported from Washington. AP reporter Curt Anderson contributed from Tampa, Florida.
___
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP鈥檚 with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
