Burial markers for African Americans dating back to the 18th century are being preserved at God’s Little Acre in Newport, Rhode Island Photo: Phillip Keith
At the MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, the location of a Black cemetery has been confirmed through a non-intrusive archaeological survey. So far, 121 potential graves have been identified, with the survey, which involves ground-penetrating radar, still ongoing.
In 2019, Rodney Kite-Powell, a historian at the Tampa Bay History Center, alerted the base that a cemetery used from the 1840s to the 1920s by the local Black community was part of its land. He had identified it through a 1930s book surveying cemeteries that had specific details about the burial ground’s location.
Kite-Powell tells The Art Newspaper: “I was going through this book, and one thing that caught my eye was Port Tampa, which was still a separate city. I knew that it had a decent-sized population, and it was far enough from Tampa that it should probably have a cemetery.” He adds that even though the air base started operating in 1941 (soon after the book’s publication), because the South was ruled by segregationist Jim Crow laws, the families of the interred would have had little power to claim the land. “It tells the story, like any cemetery, of those that came before us,” he says. “But it also has this extra part of how we have treated each other.”
A plaque at the Port Tampa Cemetery site states: “It was one of several African American cemeteries in the area that had been forgotten or purchased for redevelopment.” Although some of these cemeteries may have been overlooked and then obscured by overgrowth, others were intentionally obliterated.
Zion Cemetery, dating from 1901 to the 1920s, is considered Tampa’s oldest Black cemetery. It was rediscovered in 2019 below a public-housing complex, and more than 100 graves have been identified. “It was a properly platted piece of land that subsequently was replatted without any mention that there’s a cemetery on that property,” Kite-Powell says, referring to the desecration of its grave plots through remapping. “Zion was purposefully obscured from the public record so the land could be developed.”
Countless African American cemeteries have been deliberately forgotten, destroyed or damaged. The tally is impossible to determine due to the lack of attention to their care. While historic Black cemeteries face the same challenges as all historic cemeteries, such as the loss of funds for upkeep once burials stop, they have also been subject to the structural racism that has marginalised Black people going back to slavery.
The racial segregation that separated schools, housing and transportation also divided cemeteries, with some of the physical barriers enduring into the 21st century—such as a chain-link fence dividing a cemetery in Mineola, Texas, that was not removed until 2020. During urban-renewal and road-construction projects, Black cemeteries were especially vulnerable. Their graves frequently lacked visibility, as the burial sites of enslaved people were often unmarked; later, Jim Crow laws led to poverty and migration away from the South, resulting in more unmarked graves and little family left in the area to care for them. Public funding has further disregarded Black cemeteries—the state of Virginia, for instance, has provided money to Confederate cemeteries for decades but Black cemeteries only since 2017.
“When you’re talking about neglect, you have to understand how Jim Crow completely undermined the ability of Black ancestors to matter,” says Kami Fletcher, a professor of history at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania. “For us to say that, as a country, death is the great equaliser and we honour everybody—that’s just not true.”
With no legal protection for property ownership, Black cemeteries were lost to the construction of roads, industry and infrastructure, not only in the South but all over the US. “This land just got from under these Black folks due to the unscrupulous practices of developers who wanted it,” Fletcher says.
Stories of cemeteries being treated as disposable land for development rather than sacred spaces can be found throughout the sites mapped by the Black Cemetery Network (BCN). For example, the Second Asbury AME (African Methodist Episcopal) cemetery on Staten Island, New York, established in 1850, was illegally seized by the city in the 1950s and is now the site of a strip mall. Evergreen Cemetery, founded in 1905 in St Petersburg, Florida, was closed and condemned by the city and then had a highway built over it.
BCN was founded in 2021 by Antoinette Jackson, an anthropology professor at the University of South Florida (USF), to bring together volunteers and organisations involved in caring for cemeteries. Kaleigh Hoyt, BCN’s creative director and a doctoral student in anthropology at USF, says: “It was a response to this clear need to create a tool that would connect Black-cemetery-site advocates—to have a place to share their stories but to also generate a conversation among people and organisations that are all across the country and have been doing this work for generations.”
A BCN initiative called the African American Burial Ground Project, launched at USF, is focusing on historic Black cemeteries around Florida, particularly those in the Tampa Bay area. Technology such as drone mapping and ground-penetrating radar is now bringing more cemeteries to light, although challenges remain with land ownership in protecting them from degradation or development.
“There are economic disparities in their locations, and systemic problems that have contributed to their neglect,” says Brent Leggs, the executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and senior vice president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “A lot of cemeteries are located on private property, which prevents public access for descendants and cyclical maintenance.”
God’s Little Acre in Newport, Rhode Island, dates back to 1705. After decades of neglect, volunteers now maintain the site and its gravestones Photo: Phillip Keith
Cemeteries are just one part of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, which was launched in 2017. Its work includes the conservation of headstones at God’s Little Acre (dating to 1705 in Newport, Rhode Island), which experienced significant neglect over the decades and now has regular volunteer clean-ups; and geophysical and topological surveys at Olivewood Cemetery (incorporated in 1875 in Houston, Texas), which is at risk of extreme flooding due to climate change.
Although the African American Burial Grounds Preservation Act became law in 2022, the programme has yet to receive federal funding. A proposed amendment would provide $3m in annual grants to support descendant-led care of these sites across the US. By contrast, Southern states have spent at least $40m over the past decade on Confederate graves.
“Black cemeteries are integral to the cultural heritage of Black communities,” Leggs says. “We’re motivated to help communities conserve these cultural landscapes, because they often showcase unique burial practices, gravestone designs and historically significant architecture, and they are the resting place for individuals whose role in history might have been marginalised or overlooked.”
Back at the site of the Port Tampa Cemetery, the military base supports continued funding for research and surveying, which is expected to conclude in 2025. Plans on how further to mark or recognise the cemetery have yet to be announced. And although the site is just a small grassy section of the 5,700-acre air base, naming it as a cemetery after years of invisibility is just one step in honouring the dead who have so long been ignored.