By MEGAN MATTEUCCI
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
The Georgia NAACP called for an investigation of the Clayton County Commission Tuesday after the board voted for 311 historic African-American graves to be moved to another cemetery.
The Clayton County Commission voted unanimously to issue a permit to College Park recycling company Stephens MDS to relocate the graves to make room to expand a landfill. The cemetery is inaccessible and has not been visited for years before news of the possible move was announced, company officials said.
Edward DuBose, president of the Georgia NAACP, accused the five commissioners of a conflict of interest. According to DuBose, all of the commissioners have previously accepted campaign contributions from Stephens. “I’m calling for an investigation of each of the county commissioners,” DuBose told the commission. “This board sits on about $7,000 of this company’s money. We want to look to see if you were too connected to the financial contributions that were given by the company.”
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By Megan Matteucci
Monday, November 10, 2008
Seventy-four-year-old Flossie Bailey has not been able to visit her grandfather’s grave for years because she would have had to drive through a landfill, dodge bulldozers, hike through a quarry and trek through years of weeds.
Next year, she may simply have to drive to a historic African-American cemetery in Riverdale.
The Clayton County Commission is expected to issue a permit Tuesday for an archaeologist to relocate 311 abandoned African-American graves from a quarry near Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport to Carver Memorial Gardens on Upper Riverdale Road.
Some of the graves date back to the 1800s and may include former slaves.
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Quakers aided runaway slaves before the Civil War
By MELISSA NANN BURKE
Daily Record/Sunday News
What remains of Yellow Hill cemetery today are the feet of crumbling tombstones scattered in a small, isolated plot.
In antebellum Butler Township, the cemetery eight miles north of Gettysburg (Pennsylvania) was surrounded by a settlement of African-American families — mostly freedmen and probably some fugitive slaves from Maryland and Virginia.
“Some ran to Adams County and made it. Some ran and didn’t,” author and researcher Debra Sandoe McCauslin told a crowd gathered Sunday to hear her speak at the York Friends Meetinghouse.
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The African-American cemetery in La Grange was spruced up last weekend, thanks to some volunteer help.On Oct. 11, Tom Evans, owner of Evans Monument Company in the Buechel area, along with five family members and a friend, spent the day removing the limbs and getting the cemetery back to normal. They were aided by some volunteers from the First Baptist Church - La Grange.
“We just tried to straighten things up and get it as close to how it was,” Evans said. “I’d say in all we probably either fixed or leveled or resealed probably 20 to 25 monuments.”
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By Patti Mengers pmengers@delcotimes.com
COLLINGDALE — Three months ago, vandals victimized more than 200 headstones in Eden Cemetery, the oldest public African-American burial ground in the United States.
Saturday afternoon, their treachery gave way to triumph as famous figures buried in the historic graveyard were briefly “resurrected” to share their stories with about 100 participants in “A Day to Honor Our Ancestors at Eden Cemetery.”
Contralto Marian Anderson, who sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 after being denied access to Constitution Hall, and scholar Octavius Valentine Catto, who died fighting for the right to vote, were among the historic inhabitants who moved about the 106-year-old cemetery, where close to 90,000 African-Americans are buried.
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7th Annual
ACPA Membership Meeting
&
Cemetery Preservation Program
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Alabama Department of Archives & History
Milo B. Howard Auditorium
624 Washington Avenue, Montgomery, Alabama 36130
(The Archives parking lot is on Adams Street opposite the Archives Building)
No Registration Fee ~ This is a membership meeting with a short program
Preserving Alabama’s Cemeteries
Agenda
9:00 am Registration ~ Refreshments
9:30 am Welcome
• Sherry Johnston, President
9:40 am ACPA Board Meeting
• Sherry Johnston, Presiding
• Rachel Clinkscale, Secretary - Reading of the Minutes
• Frank Brown, 1st Vice President - ACPA Happenings
10:00 am Wrought Iron Cleaning & Repair
• Jason Church - National Center for Preservation Technology and Training
10:35 am Break & Refreshements
10:45 am Photography in the Cemetery
• Jason Church - National Center for Preservation Technology and Training
11:05 am Question & Answer Session
• Jason Church - Regarding his Presentations
• ACPA Officers / Board - Cemetery Preservation
12:00 Noon Closing Remarks & Adjournment
By JIM McCONVILLE
STAFF WRITER
Pvt. Lorenzo Reynolds is finally part of the family — the long legions of military family, that is.
The former Asbury Park resident and Union veteran of the Civil War finally has received his gravestone from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, about 97 years after he died.
About 20 people gathered at Reynolds’ grave at Mount Prospect Cemetery Saturday morning to dedicate the marble gravestone for Reynolds, an African-American who served with Company A, 11th Regiment of the New Jersey Volunteer Infantry of the U.S. Army in 1864 and 1865.
Located about half way up the cemetery’s hilly summit, Reynolds’ grave was framed by an American flag and a flag of the Sons of Union Veterans of New Jersey along with late 19th century tintype photographs of Reynolds and members of his family.
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Submitted by Angela McCarty
Wake County, NC Commissioners voted ‘YES’ to building a high school on the site of a Slave Cemetery with more than 60 Slaves buried on a hill. The Plantation once owned by Peterson Dunn had over 200 Slaves on the plantation at one time. The site should and would have been a Historic Landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is one of the largest slave cemeteries left undisturbed and intact since the Civil War. Cannon balls from the war have also been found on and near the property, along with several other items dating back to that era.
The Wake County School Board, still pursued the property after the cemetery was made public at the Wake County Board of Commissioners meeting on October 6th, 2008, which they passed a 5/2 vote to purchase the 80 acre property for 4.8 million dollars anyway. County Commissioners in Virginia, Georgia and Tennessee voted ‘NO’ to having a high school built on land which would have been built on or around a slave cemetery as they noted ‘That preserving their State’s and Nation’s history was so important, in regards to Historic Preservation’.
The School Board says now they intend to build around it. The cemetery was located where the student parking lot was intended to be. This historical site should be preserved with dignity to the slaves that are buried there and be donated to the State for Historic Preservation. There are at least 60 head stone markers, and more are found daily, and still more yet to find.
If you need to contact me or Debbie Vair please feel free to do so, or the NAACP:
Angela McCarty: (919) 217-8364, email flys_low@yahoo.com
Debbie Vair: (919) 761-3766, email dvair@granitefallsclub.com
NAACP Ronald White: (919) 846-7045, email jrwite@aol.com
For further information: http://www.savetheslaves.com/
October 18, 2008
Richmond Town Journal
By MARTIN ESPINOZA
The Canada geese fly into Frederick Douglass Memorial Park every morning, leaving their droppings on the decrepit asphalt roads and their webbed prints on the small grave markers lying flat against the soft ground. These days, they are the most frequent visitors.
The park, an African-American cemetery nearly filled to capacity, surrounded by middle-class homes in the Richmond Town neighborhood of Staten Island, has mounting debts and few ways to make money. Frederick Douglass is not buried here; the cemetery was renamed for him in 1935 when a black funeral director recast it as a place where the city’s black residents could be buried with dignity and not simply confined to the least desirable areas of local burial lawns.
On a recent day off, Donna Giello-Borgia, a second-grade teacher at Public School 329 in Coney Island, whacked at a pole-bound scarecrow using an old pipe wrench, driving it into a patch of grass on the front lawn of her semidetached home on Corona Avenue in Richmond Town. Her backyard looks out at the northwest end of the cemetery, yielding views of soft grassy slopes, oaks, willows and the noisy comings and goings of geese.
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Design elements include rows of headstones and a pavilion with a memorial wall of names.
By Michael Lee Pope
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Although C.J. Howard originally planned to have an African-American Union soldier at the southern end of Freedman’s Cemetery answering the Confederate solider statue eight blocks to the north, the steering committee overseeing planning for the park nixed that idea as too militaristic. Instead, committee members decided to use a statue used in one of the other 200 proposals that were submitted as part of a competition that included entries from all 50 states and 20 countries. They felt it would better reflect the population that was buried there because all the military burials were moved in 1865 to the Alexandria National Cemetery.
“I wanted to create a park that had the feel of a cemetery,” said Howard, a Mount Vernon architect. “It has a sense of memorial without the headstones overwhelming everything.”
Howard’s vision for the Freedman’s Cemetery Park is based on the original 1864 design layout, with 600 headstones representing about a third of the actual burials that took place during the rest of the 1860s. In one part of the park a statute will feature six African-American Union soldiers acting as pallbearers for a hexagonal casket bearing scenes of emergence from slavery. The old cart paths that formed an axis within the space will become walkways connecting cemetery space and open space to a nature area west of the park. Earlier this month, the steering committee asked Howard to add an eternal flame and interpretive panels.
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