Finding reconciliation for abandoned Black cemeteries – 60 Minutes

In Clearwater, Florida final century, segregation followed people into the grave. Now the injustices of the previous are resurfacing. 

After human stays started rising from the bottom at a faculty, a swimming pool, and an workplace constructing, archeologists have found that graves from segregated cemeteries had been constructed over, their beforehand interred our bodies now buried beneath the next growth. 

To assist proper this flawed, a Florida state congresswoman is now pushing laws to seek out and restore these forgotten historic cemeteries. 

One of Clearwater’s destroyed cemeteries, the North Greenwood Cemetery, had served the Black group earlier than town determined to relocate the graves within the mid-Nineteen Fifties. The metropolis used the land to construct a faculty and swimming pool for Black residents, quite than integrating the white group pool. At the time, town had mentioned it might transfer the interred our bodies to a close-by cemetery. But dozens of unmarked graves had been left behind, solely to be found a long time later.

One of these graves belonged to Lois Saylor Bell’s paternal grandmother, who had died when Bell’s father was younger. Bell’s father had moved away from Florida after his mom’s loss of life, and years later, when he returned to Florida, he sought out his mom’s grave. (*60*) to Bell, her father came upon that his mom’s physique had by no means been relocated. 

Bell hopes her father, now in his late 80s, can discover a conclusion emotionally. But the scenario is sophisticated, she mentioned, by the truth that her grandmother’s last resting place grew to become a faculty the place Black kids had been educated. 

“To get him some type of closure hopefully before he expires would be great,” Bell mentioned. “But at the same time, this was a school where a lot of Blacks actually attended the school. And to disturb that would be actually disturbing the graves again.”

Lifelong Clearwater resident Diane Stephens grew up close to the previous North Greenwood Cemetery. Today she recollects a childhood of watching the bodily and emotional ramifications of disturbing individuals’s last resting locations.

“When I was smaller, the rain, when it would saturate the ground, bones would come up,” Stephens mentioned. “And we would go out there, and my parents would tell us to just leave them there — they’re looking. They’re looking for their descendants, and they’re looking for a resting place.”

At one other abandoned Black cemetery in Clearwater, disturbed graves now relaxation beneath an workplace constructing’s car parking zone. The website had beforehand been the place the St. Matthews Baptist Church and three different church buildings established a cemetery and buried the neighborhood’s residents. The neighborhood was referred to as Clearwater Heights, and its residents had been predominantly Black. The neighborhood not exists at the moment. 

Carlton Childs Sr., whose nice-grandfather based Clearwater Heights, mentioned that, when the cemetery land was offered within the mid-Nineteen Fifties, unmarked graves had been seemingly by no means moved. Dignity in loss of life, it appeared, was afforded to those that had sufficient cash in life to purchase a gravestone. 

In uncovering the reality of what occurred to his group’s ancestors, Childs mentioned that, when a cemetery disappears, so does belief. 

“Who is going to be real and transparent with us about what can be done?” Childs requested. “And who is going to take the responsibility for owning up to what has been done to our ancestors, and to our people, and to the generations to come?”

Florida Rep. Fentrice Driskell hopes to assist with at the least a part of Childs’ request. 

Because Florida has found effaced and erased Black cemeteries everywhere in the state, Driskell this previous spring launched a invoice that may create a state company to assist discover these cemeteries and to determine some technique to memorialize them for future generations. 

Driskell’s Abandoned African American Cemeteries invoice (HB 1215) would have created an Office of Historic Cemeteries to coordinate analysis, restore, restoration, and upkeep efforts in any respect historic cemeteries. It additionally sought funding to create an Abandoned African American Cemeteries Advisory Council. 

Driskell’s invoice handed its state House committees with unanimous help however died within the Senate. The congresswoman mentioned she plans to reintroduce the invoice in a future legislative session. 

When requested if she had a message for these she is making an attempt to characterize, the individuals mendacity in vanishing graveyards, Driskell mentioned she would inform them that their lives mattered — and nonetheless have that means at the moment. 

“And although we cannot change what happened to them, we can certainly try to right those wrongs present day by acknowledging the wrong that happened to them and committing our present-day resources and faculties to making sure that nothing like this ever happens again.”

The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer and Will Croxton. It was edited by Will Croxton.