Black Deaths Matter

[struggle4progress]

Historic black cemeteries have devolved into trash dumps and overgrown forests, while tidy Confederate memorials still draw public funding.
By Seth Freed Wessler
YESTERDAY 9:32 AM

On a spring morning a few years ago in St. Louis, Missouri, Etta Daniels, a spry 72-year-old with oval wire-frame glasses, was in the northeast corner of Greenwood Cemetery, where she often came on Saturdays, searching for gravestones “before they disappear.” She’d already spent more than a decade helping families locate and honor their loved ones buried in Greenwood. That day, she was joined by 69-year-old Barbara Harris, who is “not usually one to go to the woods.” Wearing gardening gloves and long sleeves to keep off the poison ivy and bugs, Harris was hoping that, with Daniels’s help, she could find her great-grandmother’s grave.

“We had to crawl over great big trees that had fallen,” Harris says of the trek through one of St. Louis’s oldest African-American cemeteries, founded less than a decade after the Civil War. “I wanted to find her grave again, but the stones are all covered and the paths, you can’t find them.”

In the thick forest that Greenwood has become, the once-grassy plot where Harris’s great-grandmother, Henrietta Flowers Ware, was buried in 1966 had disappeared. Back then, Greenwood’s 32 acres were well kept, the lawns mowed close by the cemetery’s owners and by the families and funeral homes that patronized it. But by the late 1980s, Harris found whole sections uncut, the ravines piled with trash and junked cars. On her final trip to Greenwood, Harris’s car got stuck on one of the roads. “I didn’t feel it was safe to visit anymore,” she says ...

Etta Daniels’s desk in the living room of her St. Louis apartment is piled with photocopies of cemetery records. For 10 years, she has been slowly building an archive of the dead, photographing gravestones in the woods and scouring burial records. “Every time I start digging, I find another story about St. Louis,” she says, and begins listing the names of men and women buried in Greenwood whose biographies she’s been piecing together. She and other volunteer researchers have found a mother lode of black St. Louis history: Maya Angelou’s grandmother; black veterans of the Civil War and every American war until Vietnam; the outlaw Lee Shelton; civil-rights leader Charleton Tandy; Lucy Ann Delaney, a writer and former slave; and Daniels’s great- grandmother, Sallie Jones Ross, who was part of the Great Migration from Mississippi as well as a survivor of the East St. Louis riots. “You find a rich history of black St. Louis that we don’t even talk about,” Daniels adds. “The issue here is that so much stuff gets covered up” ...

http://www.thenation.com/article/black-deaths-matter/

[mr goodbeer]

1. I read that article earler today

Truly disgraceful.

[Igel]

3. That's the way it works.

Not all white cemeteries are well endowed. Some are in the same situation as the black ones. More than a few have been relocated because the ground was more profitable for some other use--attempted for the one cemetery in the OP, but often when they're relocated most of the families are also in shock--graves are stacked to save space, remains are repackaged since after 80 years and the decomposition of the cheaper coffins they don't always take up the same amount of space. Some cemeteries have, like black cemeteries, simply been lost and are only found when there's construction that disturbs the graves.

Some of the white graveyards are just overgrown. Having all the trash dumped on the graveyard makes it harder to maintain and makes it more of an eyesore.

Eugene has a pioneer graveyard--it grew since then, but fell into disrepair. It wasn't endowed. Then in the '70s the community got involved and set up an endowment, my guess in the afterglow of centenary enthusiasm. Volunteers ran the endowment, and volunteers helped maintain it for a while, as well. It's in tolerable shape now, but gets maintenance only something like 3 times a year--mowing, pruning, trimming, etc. While people could dump appliances and trash there because most of it's open and unguarded, nobody did when I was there. That would make paying the maintenance crew possible less expensive. The worst that happens is that every once in a while somebody goes in and tips over gravestones. There apparently were several attempts to move it but that was long before I lived in Oregon.

Making life a bit stranger is the Federal government's mandate (since 1929, it seems) to maintain both union and confederate graves, on public land or private. The Atlantic tried to produce a scandal because when it wrote about this in 2013 most of the more recent gravestone requests were for confederate graves. Of course, union graves had been marked and maintained for decades before confederate graves fell under the mandate, but that wasn't information that the Atlantic cared for anybody to know. (Beyond that, the government just says that it's the law and their job, prosecutorial negligence notwithstanding, is to follow the law.) The Missouri Confederate Memorial, whose occupants were pretty well rotted before the grandparents off all but the oldest of us were even born, is part graveyard, part historical museum, part public park (that's from their website--the cemetery part isn't most of it, by any means). It's sort of like Gettysburg without most of the huge monuments, so I guess it's probably more like the Antietam or Vicksburg site writ small. I'm guessing that if Missouri wanted to--perhaps it has--they could get the VA to cough up funding.

Having visited a lot of Civil War sites in my travels and relocations, I really have trouble working up a good head of hate or vilification--rather like feeling really strong negative emotions at David Tennant and Matt Smith for what the Brits did to my Irish ancestors. Any strong emotions I have for the unexperienced past are due to the present, and dislocating them into the past gives them nice, convenient, safe but useless symbolic targets to take out my frustrations on.

[marym625]

2. K&R

Such a disgrace