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The latest discovery of African-American graves in Clearwater, Florida, has added to developers and urban planners’ history of deceit and neglect of burial grounds. The hallowed ground, known as the old St. Matthew cemetery, was found under an office building and parking lot. The developers who bought the land promised officials that the graves would be moved as the property would be prepared for commercial development. As has happened around Florida, this promise was broken.
These broken promises echo a similar story at other Florida African-American burial sites, including two in Tampa. The Tampa Bay Times helped uncover at least two more African-American cemeteries that were abandoned and built over. Some graves are under the parking lot at Tropicana Field, home of the Tampa Bay Rays. Hundreds more were found at the site of a public housing complex.
This trend of discounting the importance of preserving Black neighborhoods and cemeteries is a constant in Florida history. In Clearwater, city council records from the mid-1950s show officials discussed using road improvements as an “inducement to confine Negro home building and purchasing to the existing area.”
The re-discovery of two African-American cemeteries in Tampa in 2019 prompted the Hillsborough County Board of Commissioners to investigate the disappearance of these cemeteries and determine whether there are more unmarked cemeteries in the county. The board will Identify African-American and Afro-Cuban cemeteries that may have been obfuscated from the record during the Jim Crow Era.
University of South Florida anthropologist Antoinette Jackson recently helped create the Black cemetery network. The African-American Burial Ground & Remembering Project (AABGP) is working to address black cemetery erasures in the Tampa Bay area to coordinate research and advocacy efforts that share the same goal: to preserve black cemeteries by telling their stories.
A bill is also in the works in Congress that would create an African-American Burial Grounds Network under the direction of the National Park Service.