 | | Yamona Pierce, center, and her daughters, Hannah, left, and Leah.Shuran Huang for The New York Times |
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Burial Grounds Lie in Ruins |
The child's headstone is inscribed simply "Nannie," marking the grave of a 7-year-old girl who died on May 18, 1856. She is buried in one of Washington's oldest Black cemeteries, in a neglected corner of Georgetown. For years she has touched visitors who have left toys, dolls and birthday cards at her grave. |
This year on Juneteenth, the June 19 holiday commemorating Emancipation, 200 people visited the Mount Zion-Female Union Band Society cemeteries to see Nannie's grave and others buried there. The crowd was a big one for the long-struggling burial grounds, adjacent to one another and separated by only a battered cyclone fence from the neighboring Oak Hill Cemetery, the premier final address for Washington's largely white elite. |
"It was amazing" that such a large, multiracial group had come, said Lisa Fager, the executive director of the Black Georgetown Foundation, a nonprofit managing the preservation of the two cemeteries. |
 | | The Mount Zion-Female Union Band Society Cemetery in Washington.Brian Palmer for The New York Times |
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After the visitors had gone, someone set fire that night to Nannie's grave, scorching her tombstone and destroying its decorations. Ms. Fager, unaware of the damage when she led a tour group to the grave the next morning, let out a scream upon discovering the charred grass and melted toys. |
Georgetown is a moneyed enclave well-monitored by home security cameras and police, but the culprit has not been found. The vandalism of Nannie's grave is a reflection of the decay, destruction and desecration plaguing many of America's Black cemeteries. From tiny, moss-enshrouded plantation plots to sprawling urban sites, tens of thousands of these burial grounds lie in ruins, their history fading or lost. |
Three Black women, shocked by the condition of cemeteries in Washington, Georgia and Texas, have turned their anger into action. None have prior experience in historic preservation, landscape architecture or design. But like many others working to save Black cemeteries, they view the work as a sacred trust and payment of a debt to ancestors who led the way. |
"We stand on their shoulders," said Margott Williams, who founded a nonprofit entrusted with the care of Olivewood Cemetery in Houston. |
In Washington, Ms. Fager single-handedly took on the city and federal government when work crews dug into the border of the Female Union Band Society cemetery to revamp a bike path. In Midland, Ga., Yamona Pierce demanded that Georgia Power repair the damage from plowing an access path over graves at Pierce Chapel African Cemetery. In Houston, Ms. Williams pushed a lawn mower the mile to and from her home to Olivewood for months, eventually convincing the county to legally entrust her with the overgrown cemetery's care. |
No accurate count exists of how many Black burial grounds survive. Brent Leggs, the director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation's African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, notes that a recent grant competition drew proposals from 5,400 Black cemeteries seeking a total of some $650 million, more than six times the amount available from private and corporate donors. The trust has begun to map Black burial places, and offers preservation grants. But the work is slow, and the money never enough. |
"Within the Black community, there is a deep well of civic needs, and it can be difficult to make the case for preservation," Mr. Leggs said. "But this is about reminding the nation of its social responsibility to care for its history." |
Washington provides little help. Late last year, Congress passed the African American Burial Grounds Preservation Act, which authorized $3 million for competitive grants to identify, research and preserve Black cemeteries. Congress has yet to appropriate even that. |
 | | The cemeteries are in a formerly Black enclave known from the mid-19th century through the 1930s as Herring Hill. The area was also home to the capital's Black elite: merchants, doctors, lawyers and clergy.Shuran Huang for The New York Times |
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Mourning graves 'obliterated' |
The gate to Pierce Chapel African Cemetery was padlocked and beyond it was a trash-filled, overgrown lot. But Ms. Pierce, who had traveled in August 2019 from Washington, D.C., to Midland, Ga., with her two teenage daughters to find her ancestors' graves, was determined to press on. |
Ms. Pierce — there is no known relation between her last name and that of the cemetery — inquired at the Pierce Chapel United Methodist Church across the road. Soon a young man in a pickup truck met her, her daughters and two cousins at the cemetery's entrance. Founded around 1828, the cemetery was a burying place for at least 500 people enslaved on nearby plantations in Harris County. |
Relatives of Ms. Pierce's, by then well into their 90s, had long told her that her great-great-great grandparents were buried there. They recalled cleaning their graves in a cemetery whose stones, pottery and plantings of yucca and periwinkle were a window into ancestral burial practices. |
The young man, who said he was a descendant of one of the original landowners, questioned Ms. Pierce about her connection to the cemetery, then agreed to let the group in. |
Soon they were picking their way over downed branches to a few sagging gravestones. Standing aghast in a scrub forest, humiliated that the young man had treated her like a trespasser, Ms. Pierce could barely look at her girls. |
"I had no words for them," she said. "I felt the pain and hurt that my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother must have felt — the reason they never took us out there." |
Read the rest of the story here. |
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