Endangered African American Historic Sites

Olivewood Cemetery - Houston, Texas

 

Incorporated in 1875, Olivewood Cemetery in Houston, Texas, is one of the oldest-known platted African American cemeteries in Houston, with more than 4,000 burials on its 7.5-acre site. The final resting place of many notable figures in Houston's early African American community and of formerly enslaved Africans, this Texas Historic Cemetery and UNESCO Site of Memory for the Slave Route Project also illustrates unique African American burial practices developed in pre-Emancipation Black communities, including upright pipes as grave features, the use of ocean shells as grave ornaments, and upside-down or inverted text.

Over time, changing demographics and increased development led to the cemetery's decline and abandonment. Decades of neglect, vandalism, uncontrolled invasive vegetation, and the occasional use of the cemetery as an illegal dumping ground took their toll. But the most persistent threat is the impact of extreme weather events due to climate change. Historic gravesites are being damaged and even lost entirely due to extreme precipitation events that cause erosion as uncontrolled run-off and greater volumes of water move at higher speeds through the bayou adjacent to the cemetery.

The nonprofit Descendants of Olivewood, Inc. formed in 2003 to restore and maintain the cemetery and now has legal guardianship. With the support of an African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund grant in 2021, the organization has undertaken a comprehensive study to clarify the extent of the threat from flooding and erosion, and identify specific protection and mitigation measures, but advocates will need partnerships and funding in order to implement these plans.


Morningstar Tabernacle No. 88 Order of Moses Cemetery and Hall - John Cabin, Maryland

 

In 1880, the formerly enslaved couple Robert and Sarah Gibson bought property on what is now Seven Locks Road in Cabin John, Maryland. By 1895 nine other black families had joined them in buying land here. Together these families built a self-reliant settlement, called Gibson Grove, later just No. 10.

 

In 1882, the community organized the first black school in the district. In 1885, it established Morningstar Tabernacle No. 88 of the Order of Moses. This benevolent society helped members in times of need and in death. Its Moses Hall and Cemetery were adjacent to each other. By the 1880s the community was on the church circuit; in 1898 Sarah Gibson gave land to formally establish the Gibson Grove AME Zion Church. The school for the local black children never had a dedicated building; it was alternatively housed in the church and the Moses Hall lodge.

 

The Moses Hall foundation in Cabin John is the last known surviving remnant of an Order of Moses hall in Montgomery County.


Sarah E. Ray House - Detroit, Michigan

In 1945, over a decade before Rosa Parks famously defied Jim Crow segregation laws, another Black woman in Detroit, Michigan won an important case in the United States Supreme Court. Because of her race, Sarah Elizabeth Ray had been denied passage aboard the steamship SS Columbia on an excursion to Bob-Lo Island. According to the assistant general manager of the Bob-Lo Excursion Company, which operated the steamship, it had a policy of excluding "'Zoot-suiters,' the rowdyish, the rough, and the boisterous, and… colored."

Ray then went to the NAACP, where she filed a criminal complaint against the Bob-lo Company. 

The local courts ruled in Ms. Ray's favor. The owners of the line appealed to the Michigan State Supreme Court, which subsequently also ruled in Ms. Ray's favor. The Bob-lo Company then appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the Court to hold the state's civil rights act unconstitutional because it infringed upon the power of Congress to regulate interstate and foreign commerce. In a historic ruling, The Court upheld the Michigan civil rights. Bob-Lo Excursion Co. v. People of the State of Michigan, 333 U.S. 28 affirmed the ruling of the lower courts, signaling the Supreme Court's willingness to protect the civil rights of Black Americans. This case would prove crucial in paving the way for Brown v. Board of Education.


Friday, August 5, 2022 • • General
Artistine Lang was president of a neighborhood association on the Peninsula. She put that on the back burner more than a decade ago, she said, and started focusing on caring for Pleasant Shade cemetery with her husband Rev. Darnell Lang.

They did fundraisers and organized volunteer cleanups of park, but it was a daunting task - to clean up and care for 20 acres of overgrown, marshy territory. Over the years, volunteers have come and gone, but the park is still in need of upkeep.

"We are trying, and hopefully things will change," Rev. Lang said. "But as it stands right now, it looks kind of bleak, I must admit."

Virginia has a program that funds maintenance for historic Black cemeteries, allotting $5 per grave. But as a private cemetery, Pleasant Shade doesn't qualify, even though it was the main cemetery for Black people across the Peninsula for decades.

Thursday, July 21, 2022 • • General
Long-lost church in Williamsburg was once under a parking lot.

Archaeologists, blessed by community prayers and a reading from scripture, began to excavate graves this week at the long-lost site of the original First Baptist Church in Colonial Williamsburg, one of the oldest Black churches in the country.

Forty-one grave shafts have now been discovered at the site of the church, which was torn down in 1955 and covered by a parking lot because it didn't fit the town's Colonial motif.

Thursday, July 21, 2022 • • General
On July 19, 2022, the National Trust for Historic Preservation awarded $3 million in grants to 33 sites and organizations through its African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.The grants will fuel the protection and preservation of historic sites representing African American history, across four categories: building capital, increasing organizational capacity, project planning and development, and programming and education. These often-overlooked places hold aspects of history that must be protected—and used to draw inspiration and wisdom for the benefit of all Americans.

Saturday, June 11, 2022 • • General
The former Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, North Carolina, has the potential to greatly enhance its role as a community anchor once again. Founded in 1902 by groundbreaking educator Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Palmer Memorial Institute transformed the lives of more than 1,000 African American students over nearly seven decades.

Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama, played a pivotal role in the Selma to Montgomery marches that were instrumental to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Built in 1908 by formerly enslaved Black builder A.J. Farley, Brown Chapel provided sanctuary to civil rights activists and church members as they convened to plan protests against African American voter disenfranchisement.

Incorporated in 1875, Olivewood Cemetery in Houston, Texas, is one of the oldest-known platted African American cemeteries in Houston, with more than 4,000 burials on its 7.5-acre site.

Saturday, June 11, 2022 • • General
Slave Dwellings: Ivy Cliff Slave Dwelling, Bedford County; and Parker Sydnor Cabin, Mecklenburg County; Grand Order of Odd Fellows Lodge/ African American School, Reedville, Northumberland County; Green Valley Pharmacy, Arlington and looking back on previous listings of historic schools: the Havelock School in Warsaw, and the Saint Paul's Chapel Rosenwald School in Brunswick County.

Wednesday, November 17, 2021 • • General
African American Places in Peril include: Red Oak Creek Covered Bridge, Thicket Ruins, Imperial Hotel, Georgia B. Williams Nursing Home, Good Shepherd Episcopal School and the West Broad Street School.

Saturday, May 14, 2022 • • General
Like religious congregants all over, the people of historic Brown Chapel AME Church turned off the lights and locked the doors at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic because it wasn't safe to gather for worship with a deadly virus circulating. For a time, the landmark church that launched a national voting rights movement in Selma, Alabama, was off limits.

What members found when they returned was heartbreaking: Termites had eaten so much wood that parts of the structure weren't stable anymore, said member Juanda Maxwell, and water leaks damaged walls. Mold was growing in parts of the building, where hundreds met before Alabama state troopers attacked voting rights demonstrators on Bloody Sunday in 1965 at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

"It's in horrible shape," said Maxwell. "It's a tough time. Because we were closed for a year it exacerbated the problem with water coming in."

Wednesday, November 3, 2021 • • General
For more than 27 years, the African American Heritage Preservation Foundation (AAHPF) has advocated to mitigate the threat to endangered African American sites across the United States.

The Founder and President, E. Renee Ingram, was driven to save her family cemetery, the historic Stanton Family Cemetery, in Central Virginia, from a state highway improvement project that would have impacted the site. Working with community and state officials, her family was able to preserve the 49 burials and have the state highway department realign their improvement plans. Ingram's passion reached beyond her family's victory and she embarked on a mission advocating for the preservation of endangered African American sites across the country.

Now AAHPF locates, registers, and shares information for saving as many notable endangered African American Historic Sites as possible. Here's a list of many of those sites.

Thursday, October 7, 2021 • • General
WILLIAMSBURG, Va. (AP) — The brick foundation of one of the nation's oldest Black churches has been unearthed at Colonial Williamsburg, a living history museum in Virginia that continues to reckon with its past storytelling about the country's origins and the role of Black Americans.

The First Baptist Church was formed in 1776 by free and enslaved Black people. They initially met secretly in fields and under trees in defiance of laws that prevented African Americans from congregating.

By 1818, the church had its first building in the former colonial capital. The 16-foot by 20-foot (5-meter by 6-meter) structure was destroyed by a tornado in 1834.

Saturday, September 11, 2021 • • General
ANNAPOLIS, MD. — Rita Coates fought a feeling of panic as the water gushed toward the graves.

Coates, a longtime member of the Brewer Hill Cemetery Association, watched a torrent of stormwater wash over this historic African American graveyard last year, erasing the engravings on headstones and the legacies they represented.

"All the water was running through washing away the soil from the graves," Coates recalled in a recent interview with E&E News. "There were some grave markers that were so ruined or messed up that you could not tell the names on them."

Brewer Hill Cemetery is the oldest Black graveyard in Annapolis. It contains the remains of more than 7,000 slaves and freed African Americans who were not allowed to be buried alongside white people.