If you have ever walked around an historic cemetery before, you’ve probably noticed how much you can learn about a person or a group of people by looking at their headstones and graves. The social history of a culture or community is often reflected within a cemetery. You can find clues to their religion or spiritual beliefs, their socioeconomic status, familial ties, demographics, and even settlement patterns. Burial practices are usually so important and central to a culture that they are one of the slowest traditions to change over time. Therefore, burial practices can be seen as a window into the core values of a group of people. This is true for all cultures, but is of great value in studying groups of people and cultures that have been disenfranchised, including African Americans. Unfortunately, just like so many other parts of their culture, cemeteries of these disenfranchised groups have all too often been forgotten or neglected, and in many cases, destroyed. These sites have not always been viewed as being worthy of preservation. However, that is starting to change.
This past 2020 Florida legislative session saw the introduction of the 2020 Abandoned African American Cemeteries bill. This bill was spurred by the destruction of Zion Cemetery in Tampa, Florida. Zion Cemetery is thought to be the first African American cemetery in Tampa. This bill would have created a task force and would have required the memorialization of specific African American cemeteries in Florida. This bill did not make it all the way through the legislative process, but is a great first step in the acknowledgment of the harm done to these cemeteries and those they represent. There has also been action taken at the federal level, with the introduction of the African American Burial Grounds Network Act in Congress. This act would create a voluntary network of African American cemeteries and provide federal assistance to ensure that these sites are preserved and maintained.
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| A portion of what once was Zion Cemetery in Tampa (photo courtesy of Tampa Bay Times) |
These types of legislation are important because they acknowledge that there have been injustices and that these sites do indeed have value to our shared understanding of history. This is especially important because so often these cemeteries are the only surviving evidence of historic African American communities. For many of these cemeteries there is no official documentation of where they are located or who is interred in the cemetery. Oftentimes the grave markers are gone or degraded. Rarely were these cemeteries noted on maps or historic plats, but they are often well known to the local African American communities. Therefore, they require extra work and extra care to protect them. Oral histories can sometimes fill in gaps that are left by the lack of written documentation, but these sources are all too often overlooked or not sought after.
These cemeteries serve as a tangible record of a disenfranchised group and many times reflect ancient funerary practices based in Africa. These traditions came over with the enslaved, and in some places these customs are still practiced today. Historic cemeteries create a sense of place, a sense of shared heritage and community, a sense of self and belonging. Losing these sites would mean losing important and unique historical, cultural, and genealogical information. Ignoring the contribution of these historic cemeteries to our shared historical knowledge also further neglects a group that has already endured far too much and does nothing to create a holistic and accurate view of our state and national histories.
To learn more about historic African American and African Caribbean cemeteries, you can check out Sharyn Thompson’s select bibliography for reading suggestions.
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