When you think of a “cemetery conference,” you might be tempted to assume it’s a somber affair, much like the atmosphere you might feel at a traditional funeral ceremony.
But that wasn’t the case at the first national Black Cemetery Network Conference at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg campus last week.
While the facts surrounding the need for Black cemetery preservation are stark and sobering, the hundred or so attendees brought an air of energy, and “joy and love,” said Tampa anthropologist Antoinette Jackson.
Listen to Dr. Jackson on "Florida Matters Live & Local"
In between presentations from anthropologists and historians doing similar work across Florida and in other states, there was laughter, the sharing of phone numbers and emails, and a reinvigoration inspired by shared experiences.
“Each and every cemetery has its own issues, struggles, celebrations, but it takes time, and I think conferences like this give people that energy to see other people at work and the success or the challenges, and then go on … networking is the biggest piece of this,” Jackson said.
The Black Cemetery Network’s Tampa Bay roots
Jackson founded the Black Cemetery Network in 2021 to help identify, preserve, and record African American burial grounds and their equally buried histories.
She said the need for such a network in Florida became apparent after Tampa Bay Times reporting in 2019 found many segregated cemeteries in the state had been paved over.
ALSO READ: A historical marker is unveiled at the once-forgotten Zion Cemetery in Tampa
The network helps keep that conversation, and the work, going. The conference was an extension of that, and an attempt to deepen the connections with people doing similar work in other states.
"Academics, we can come up with the ideas, and we do the research, but then you need legal, legislation, you need archeologists, you need people in the community (to) advocate, advocate, advocate, and I think that's what people take away from this conference is advocacy,” Jackson said.
While other groups have worked to preserve Black graves for decades, Jackson said Florida is currently driving the national conversation. She said it's due to regular media attention and community members passionate about preserving history.
Reactions from attendees
Andrew Walker’s work at cemeteries began as a child. He cut grass at the historically Black Lincoln Cemetery in Gulfport. His father witnessed the exhumation of bodies from the Tropicana Field area, the former Gas Plant neighborhood, and his stillborn cousin was buried in a Hillsborough County cemetery that later became a horse farm.
Walker has also done work with Pinellas Remembers, and helped erect a marker in memory of a lynching victim. Of the lynchings that have occurred in Pinellas County, only two have been fully documented — John Evans, lynched on Nov. 12, 1914; and Parker Watson, on May 9, 1926.
Walker said his interest in Black cemetery preservation overlaps with the lynching memorial.
"When will this legacy of the dishonesty required for slavery and continued inequity end? I believe there is no more dignified way to announce those human truths than in the language of memorial, the language of those assembled here today.”Michael Blakey
“The marker documents a terrible history of terror and lynching, but it also memorializes a person who was not remembered, and so I feel like being able to tell that story is important," Walker said. "So that there's a counter narrative to the local narrative that might not be telling all the whole truth. I like getting in good trouble.”
Diane Stephens works with the Clearwater Colored Cemetery Society, which identifies living descendants and other family members of the 600 or so people who were buried in two erased Black cemeteries that operated from 1909 to 1954 in Clearwater: St. Matthew Cemetery and North Greenwood Cemetery, the latter of which Stephens lived close to growing up.
The cemeteries were featured in a "60 Minutes" segment in 2023, which further fueled the advocacy of Tampa Bay area groups trying to map out Black cemeteries that were ignored, paved over, or forgotten entirely.
“I was talking to [a] lady from Cincinnati, and she was talking about 30,000 graves, and I'm like, ‘Oh my God, you know the magnitude, the inhumanity.’ It needs to stop, and if we don't tell people about it, we're doomed to repeat it,” Stephens said.
Stephens said there’s a lot of work to be done, and hopes that members of the community and college students interested in historical preservation reach out to volunteer their time.
Isaac Shearn presented at the conference on his current research, which focuses on Laurel Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland. His work, and a book he co-authored with Elgin Klugh, "A Place for Memory," interrogates the structural inequalities that lead to the demolition of cemeteries like Laurel, and raises what he says are “important questions about the politics of memory.”
Laurel Cemetery was one of the first to join the Black Cemetery Network's directory. While documenting the true history of the cemetery and creating a memorial there is important, he said, it also fits into a bigger picture, what he calls the “reshaping of histories at an accelerated rate” through revisionist school history classes, attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and attempts to erode the gains made by the Civil Rights Act.
Baltimore, the final resting place of Edgar Allen Poe, has not one, but two grave markers at Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in Baltimore commemorating the beloved, morbid poet: his original, formerly unmarked resting place and another site for a memorial.
“What I’m interested in seeing come to pass is that government protections extended to human remains will be consistently recognized, whether on public or private lands, and that owners will be required to demarcate accurately the existence of burials, even beyond any boundaries that they may think exist.”Glenda Simmons-Jenkins
But Black residents and trailblazers in Baltimore with bigger, longer-lasting legacies don’t get the same respect, Shearn said.
“None of the people who were buried at Laurel Cemetery, none of their monuments remain … and it ties in with politics, it ties in with race and racism, and those people's stories need to be told.”
“They were civil rights activists, they were leaders of churches, they were the first Black lawyers, the first Black school teachers. These people shaped Baltimore.”
In the antebellum period, before the Civil War, one of the largest populations of free Black people were in Baltimore, “and it was actually considered at the time the Black capital of America,” Shearn said.
Harvey Johnson, who's buried at Laurel, pioneered the “Rosa Parks Model” of challenging segregation laws by demonstrating that they're unequal through his “United Brotherhood of Liberty.”
“And then the United Brotherhood of Liberty sort of inspired the Niagara Movement, which went on to form the NAACP. So some of the things that happened in Baltimore connect nationally to this struggle again.”
Looking forward
Michael Blakey, a bioarcheologist and anthropologist, was the scientific director of the African Burial Ground project in New York City in the early 90s. It's the largest excavated burial site in North America for both free and enslaved Africans.
ALSO READ: The Story Of A Memorial: The African Burial Ground In New York
During his keynote, he emphasized the importance of memorialization in human dignity, stressed the ethical treatment of human remains, and educated on the role racism has played in the need for this work.
"When will this legacy of the dishonesty required for slavery and continued inequity end? I believe there is no more dignified way to announce those human truths than in the language of memorial, the language of those assembled here today,” he told the audience.
He noted the recent vandalization of Black graves in nearby Palmetto and accused Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis of being the “poster child for the deliberate denial of Black history nationally.”
ALSO READ: Manatee County allocates money to restore desecrated Black gravesites
“No less brutal, no less racist, and inhumane than defacing cemeteries” and being driven by moves like the National Park Service scrubbing national parks sites of signs that “inappropriately disparage Americans, past or living” by acknowledging slavery and systemic racism under guidance from the Trump administration, he said.
He made a call to action to descendants of those buried at Black cemeteries to get involved, noting that the American Anthropological Association's Commission for the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains “has agreed with the world that descendants are the stewards of their ancestors, and that no one ethically owns human remains within or outside of cemeteries. Descendants are their stewards.”
Rep. Glenda Simmons-Jenkins, Gullah/Geechee national representative for Florida, hopes the conference helps inspire legislation in Florida similar to what’s been passed in Maryland.
“What I’m interested in seeing come to pass is that government protections extended to human remains will be consistently recognized, whether on public or private lands, and that owners will be required to demarcate accurately the existence of burials, even beyond any boundaries that they may think exist,” she said.
Simmons-Jenkins said human remains found in criminal investigations are afforded this dignity, and other remains should be given the same respect.
She also hopes the conference inspires people to fight back against revisionist history.
“We’re hearing a narrative in these political times that the eras of the past are no longer something that we should be concerned about, and the fact of the matter is that the errors of the past have consequences that have reverberated into this generation. So, for every error that was made, if it is not corrected, we will continue to make those errors, and that means we will continue to experience harms.”
Meanwhile, the work continues. Jackson said while the wheels have not yet officially been put into motion for a second annual conference, the interest is there.
Said Jackson: “We have ideas, so it's safe to say we'll probably do it again.”
