(CBS)
In the primary half of the twentieth century, Clearwater Heights, Florida, was a Black neighborhood — thriving, proud and anchored by religion. But being within the segregated south, African Americans couldn’t keep on the White resort, stroll on the seaside or swim within the bay. In dying, they have been laid to relaxation in segregated graveyards.
Those cemeteries have been sacred floor till the bottom grew to become priceless. In the Nineteen Fifties, headlines introduced that the city of Clearwater made a deal to maneuver a “Negro” cemetery. Hundreds of African American our bodies could be reburied to make method for a swimming pool. A division retailer was deliberate for the location of one other Black cemetery, the place once more, the our bodies have been to be moved. But O’Neal Larkin remembers, a few years later, his first revelation that one thing was terribly flawed.
“It’s not an imaginary thing that I seen. It’s what I seen with my own eyes,” Larkin informed 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley.
In 1984, Larkin, now 82 years previous, watched a development crew dig a trench via the location of a “relocated” Black cemetery.
“But I remember the parking lot where the engineers– traffic engineer was cutting the lines through,” Larkin stated, “and they cut through two coffins. That was my first knowledge of seeing it because I walked out there, and I seen it myself.”
In 2019, the Tampa Bay Times reported many segregated cemeteries in Florida had been, basically, paved. It was then that the trendy city of Clearwater determined to exhume the reality.
Rebecca O’Sullivan and Erin McKendry are archeologists for an organization known as Cardno. Cardno was employed by the city to map the desecration.
“These individuals were loved. They were family members; they were fathers and mothers,” McKendry informed Pelley. “And they were interred with love.”
“People deserve to be treated with respect,” O’Sullivan stated. “That’s the most important thing.”
McKendry and O’Sullivan pushed ground-penetrating radar over a segregated cemetery the place an workplace web site stands at the moment. They discovered 328 seemingly graves, many, underneath the car parking zone, maybe a couple of underneath the constructing and extra beneath South Missouri Avenue. 550 graves are within the cemetery’s file, McKendry and O’Sullivan discovered proof of 11 having been moved within the Nineteen Fifties.
“So there may be hundreds of bodies still at that site?” Pelley requested.
“It’s possible,” O’Sullivan stated.
Finding reconciliation for deserted Black cemeteries
Not far-off, the archeologists probed one other former cemetery. There, within the Nineteen Fifties, somewhat than combine the White group pool, the city stated it might transfer a whole bunch of our bodies to construct a Black swimming pool and a Black faculty.
“But the bodies were not removed,” McKendry stated.
Cardno discovered the proof final yr. It excavated simply deep sufficient to verify what ground-penetrating radar had steered.
A prayer was stated over the location, then they planed the sand and sieved a century of time in quest of grave markers or tributes. Inevitably relics included human stays. Teeth on the workplace constructing web site and bones on the faculty, which had closed in 2008, as a result of it was out of date.
“All of the information and the data that we collected does indicate that there are additional burials likely below the footprint of that school building,” McKendry stated.
O’Neal Larkin watched the excavation and imagined the groundbreaking on the faculty development web site in 1961.
“To dig the foundation to put this school upon,” Larkin stated. “They had to hit some form of remains.”
Likely, some households couldn’t afford a tombstone, however the archeologists discovered graves have been marked.
“This is a marker that would’ve been used initially after the burial if a stone was not ready to be placed. And in some cases, this is all that would’ve been used to mark the location of a burial,” McKendry stated.
Erin McKendry confirmed us Cardno’s catalog of proof. A dime, new in ’42, was amongst many tributes left with the lifeless.
“We also found this brass wedding ring at approximately the same location and the same depth as the dime,” McKendry stated.
The tributes and disturbed human stays have been rigorously reburied precisely the place they have been discovered pending a call on what to do subsequent.
Anthropologist Antoinette Jackson leads the African American Burial Ground Project on the University of South Florida. She’s constructing a database of desecrated cemeteries.
“Not just Clearwater, it’s nationally from New York, all the way out toward Texas, and all the way down to South Florida where these cemeteries had been built over– erased, marginalized, underfunded and need support in order to make them whole and have this history known,” Jackson informed Pelley. ” This shouldn’t be an remoted story, sadly.”
So far, Jackson has listed about 70 effaced Black cemeteries nationwide. Under housing, freeways and the county-owned car parking zone of Tropicana Field, residence to baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays.
“What we want to bring forward is the memory, the knowledge that these sites were there, these places, these cemeteries, these families were there, live, died, worked, contributed to our country, to their communities, to our hometowns,” Jackson stated.
“Is there evidence of White cemeteries being lost, abandoned,” Pelley requested, “forgotten in the way that these are?”
“There are abandoned cemeteries across the board,” Jackson stated. “There are cemeteries that are not only African American cemeteries or Black cemeteries that have been in some way desecrated, but the issue is more acute with Black cemeteries because of issues like slavery, segregation in which this particular community were legally and intentionally considered lesser than or marginalized by law.”
In Clearwater they’re debating methods to honor these entombed beneath the college, South Missouri Avenue and the property of the FrankCrum Company, which purchased its headquarters for its staffing enterprise many years after the cemetery was erased.
“I’m sure that, when they purchased that property, they didn’t know that there were bodies there,” Zebbie Atkinson, head of the Clearwater NAACP, stated.
“What would you say to someone who might make the argument that that disturbing Missouri Avenue, disturbing the FrankCrum corporation, disturbing the schools,” Pelley requested Atkinson, “way too much effort at this point in time?”
“I would say that that’s not their call. They have no family buried there,” Atkinson stated.
Atkinson helps lead the dialog of what to do now amongst descendants, companies and the city.
“Some people want to have the bodies moved to a place where they can properly memorialize them. Some of the descendant community wants to let the people stay where they are. Those are the type of things that need to be worked out,” Atkinson stated. “We have to sit and talk about it. I mean there is no easy answer with that.”
Whether the failure, within the final century, to maneuver the graves was deceit, incompetence, or indifference, we have no idea. But at the moment, Clearwater is spending $270,000 to be taught the reality. The city informed 60 Minutes it’s trying to find a compromise that can honor the lifeless. The FrankCrum Company informed us it desires to be a part of the group’s resolution. Ideas embody monuments. But for a couple of, like O’Neal Larkin, there’s just one path to justice.
“Tear it down,” Larkin informed Pelley. “Tear down that building, as far as I’m concerned. Tear the school down. Make it a shrine of memories so that people can go and use it in a proper way of remembering. To treat ’em with more dignity than what this has been treated.”
Pelley seen dignity was handled gently within the White cemeteries of Clearwater. In one he discovered a monument to a Confederate soldier, the grave embellished with a recent banner of racism. But when that cemetery discovered itself blocking a deliberate street, it was granted a reverent, round, detour.
Of these residents buried within the black cemeteries of Clearwater, there are photos of solely these: the Reverend Arthur L. Jackson, the Reverend Joseph Hines and Mack Dixon Sr. who was buried beside his spouse, Florence, three kids and two grandchildren. We have no idea the faces of 500 extra who stay ceaselessly sure by segregation and misplaced to the reminiscence of time.