The Erasure of Black History

In some places, black cemeteries have been identified and preserved - listed - among a state’s listing of all cemeteries active and inactive. But there have been times, such as in the attached article, where a historic (and more recent) cemetery has been bulldozed for development. There is a court case regarding the Moses Cemetery, where the developers have dismissed the discoveries (plural) of bones as “fauna.”

This reminded me of an experience when I first became a Civil Servant in DC. I went to work from the Rhode Island Avenue metro station. It had just been finished and the parking lot wasn’t complete. Only the driveway to the station itself was blacktop. I saw gravestones. They weren’t in neat, orderly rows. They had been tossed here and there by the bulldozer. There was a polished, black granite obelisk, maybe three feet high, laying on its side by the entrance to the parking area. It sat there all through construction and for a month after that. It finally disappeared in the spring of 1977.

It was all legal. Metro has “condemnation” power. All they had to do was advertise to the DC population that they had so many months to “move” their ancestors’ remains, after which time the cemetery would be bulldozed. The same thing happened in St. Louis. When the airport needed to expand, they could “only” do it by taking the cemetery. But airports don’t have condemnation power. So they made a deal with the St. Louis light rail system. You get two stations (and better service for our airport) and you condemn this cemetery so we can move forward. That’s how bureaucracy and societal systems can bury the past.

AND, that’s even in the face of an Environmental Impact Statement that has to list potential impacts to historic and cultural sites.