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Virginia Legislators Work To Expand Preservation of African American Cemeteries

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Neglected for decades, historic African-American cemeteries in Virginia are the focus of renewed restoration efforts, both on the state and federal levels.

“Fifteen-hundred tires, and counting,” said Brian Palmer, referring to the illegally dumped trash in Richmond’s East End Cemetery.

Palmer, a member of the Friends of East End Cemetery, is part of the restoration and reclamation effort at the once abandoned historic African American cemetery.

“In addition to pulling out privet and Virginia creeper and briars and poison ivy, we will unearth headstones — grave-markers that have been buried for a long period of time,” Palmer said.

After reclaiming the land by disposing of trash and pulling back vines that have entangled the grave sites, volunteers work to reclaim local history by identifying those buried in East End. Headstones are carefully cleaned and photographed, and added to online databases like Find A Grave and the newly organized East End Cemetery website.

During Virginia’s 2019 General Assembly session, 19 historic African American cemeteries were made eligible for state funding from the Department for Historic Resources. The fight for cemetery preservation through state funds began in 2017 with East End and the nearby Evergreen Cemetery, but each year since, Virginia has made more cemeteries eligible for funding that would provide maintenance and upkeep. This year, the Tucker Family Cemetery in Hampton was added to the list. Some believe that the Tucker Family Cemetery is the final resting place of the first child born to Africans in America, William Tucker.

Virginia Congressman Donald McEachin is looking beyond the Commonwealth for a way to preserve African American cemeteries on a national level. Speaking at Richmond’s Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia on February 23, McEachin and community members marked the introduction of a national act.

“For far too long, African American burial grounds have been abused and neglected,” McEachin said.

McEachin introduced the African American Burial Grounds Network Act to the House of Representatives on February 13. The act is also sponsored by North Carolina Congresswoman Alma S. Adams.

The act would create a national network of historic African American burial grounds to be overseen by the National Park Service. The database would be composed voluntarily, with permission needed from owners in cases where cemeteries are found on private property. Grants would be made available to aid local groups in identifying, researching, and preserving sites within the network.

“(African American Cemeteries) frequently fail to receive the same sort of state and local monetary support or assistance as predominantly white cemeteries,” McEachin said. “As a result, African American burial grounds are in a state of disrepair or inaccessibility. We’ve seen this across the country as well as in our own backyard.”

The National Parks Service currently oversees the National Register of Historic Places, which includes 48 Virginia cemeteries. While some exclusively African American cemeteries have made the list, many are segregated, with only small sections for African Americans, like Fairview Cemetery in Culpeper and East Hill in Bristol.

“Beginning with slavery and continuing well through the era of Jim Crow, African Americans were restricted from where they could bury their deceased,” McEachin said.

Mario Chiodo’s The Path of Thorns and Roses at Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery, By Awal115, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia

During the Civil War, soldiers of the United States Colored Troops of the Union Army were buried at the Contrabands and Freedman Cemetery in Alexandria. Surviving African American soldiers were outraged and demanded the burials be moved to Soldier’s Cemetery to lie with the other, white, troops. Soldier’s Cemetery is what we now call Alexandria National Cemetery, a historic veterans’ burial ground.

African American refugees from the South continued to use the Contrabands and Freedman Cemetery until 1869. After 1939, the cemetery could no longer be found on maps. In the ‘50s, a gas station was built on the site. It wasn’t until 1987 that the cemetery was rediscovered through newspaper articles from the 1860s. The site is now a memorial to the freed people of color who lived in Alexandria.

“These cemeteries, and the stories they tell, are vital to the people who have ancestors buried in them, to the communities they built, and to our shared history as Americans,” said Brett Glymph, the Executive Director of the Virginia Outdoors Foundation.

Photos (unless otherwise noted) by Brian Palmer and Erin Holloway Palmer, via 1708 Gallery

Preserving A Historic African-American Legacy

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By documenting the neglect and restoration of East End Cemetery, 1708 Gallery’s The Afterlife Of Jim Crow examines the way racism continues to affect African-American communities — even after death.

On the border of Henrico County, minutes from Interstate 64, sits Richmond’s formerly abandoned East End Cemetery. Neglected for decades, tangles of English ivy now coat pathways and graves alike. The surrounding forest has reclaimed the land, with oak and walnut trees growing straight up from burial sites.

For almost six years, volunteers and community members have been working to reclaim East End Cemetery — and its history.

Among East End’s clean-up volunteers are Brian Palmer and Erin Holloway Palmer, members of the Friends of East End Cemetery. The Palmers have brought their background in journalism, photography, and research together to create a contemporary art exhibit focused on the history of East End. The Afterlife of Jim Crow is currently on display at 1708 Gallery, in Richmond’s Arts District.

“I’ve tried to express both sides of what we’ve found at East End Cemetery,” Palmer said. “There’s the tragedy of neglect, but the tragedy does not define the place. This is a sacred site and this is an outdoor archive of the African American, the Richmond, the American experience. All of that is here, it may be buried under vines and, in some places, illegally dumped trash, but there is beauty, there is love expressed in these headstones, on the inscriptions — and there is a tremendous amount to learn.”

African Americans founded East End Cemetery in 1897, when they were often forbidden from burying their dead in white cemeteries. An estimated 17,500 people are buried at East End, some born into slavery, others into reconstruction and the era of Jim Crow laws. Among the graves are people of various stature, some prominent: doctors, bankers and business owners. Others are less distinguished farmers, cooks and tailors.

There are veterans like Clarence Hubbard, who was one of the first African Americans to join the Marine Corps, and free people of color like Josephine Johnson, who was marked among the “Free Inhabitants” of Richmond on the 1850 census. Johnson has the earliest death date in the cemetery: 1882, 15 years before the cemetery was established.

The Palmers first visited the cemetery in 2014, while working on a documentary. That documentary, Make The Ground Talk, focused on a black community in the Williamsburg area that was evicted through eminent domain; as part of the documentary, the Palmers obtained permission from the government to visit the cemetery where Brian Palmer’s great-grandparents are buried. This project ultimately led them to another African-American cemetery that had also suffered decades of neglect: East End Cemetery.

During a lull in the filming process, Holloway Palmer found herself drawn into the cleanup efforts.

“Since [Erin] wasn’t shooting or anything, she dropped down on her knees and started volunteering with the Boy Scouts who were working there,” Palmer said. That was the beginning of their work with the cemetery.

“She just got it,” Palmer said. “And she encouraged me to put my camera down the next time we visited. And I kind of got it —  the idea of doing with our hands what we were doing with our heads … we could help reclaim African American history with our hands, and that was a pretty darn powerful thing to be able to do.”

In the gallery space, elevated photos scatter the hardwood floor like grave markers. Photos show broken and abandoned grave sites — like one of a headstone, barely visible in a sea of orange lilies.

“It mimics the feeling of stepping through the stones at the cemetery,” Holloway Palmer said.

Park Myers, the 1708 Gallery curator, said the walk through the photos was designed to demonstrate the Palmers’ experience “when they’re unearthing and uncovering and reclaiming these histories.”

In the background of the gallery, the sounds of the cemetery play lightly — volunteers stepping through piles of dried leaves, vines being pulled and torn away from headstones.

Myers finds strength in the duality of the images and sounds.

“You’re able to focus on the images and somehow the sound kind of falls to the background,” Myers said. “Then when you’re not (focused on the images), the sound becomes very present.”

In the main gallery space, the bare walls pull your eyes to the back of the room, where a projector displays an important part of the restoration project — a new interactive website.

Holloway Palmer describes the new website as “a community asset.”

“It was … important to make sure it was collaborative,” said Jolene Smith, the website’s developer.

The website, which is split into three parts, allows for community contributions. The first part, “People,” identifies the known gravesites from East End Cemetery. So far, 245 burials have been identified on the website.

“Whenever we find a headstone, we try to find out whatever we can about a person,” Holloway Palmer said. “What we’re able to find really varies.”

Profiles for the deceased are assembled with information from Ancestry.com and other sites that track historical documents. Old newspapers are also of value, specifically the Richmond Planet, an African American newspaper that ran from 1883 until 1996.

Despite the resources, the Palmers and Smith still need community contributions to complete and contextualize the stories of these individuals. People who know of family members buried in East End Cemetery are encouraged to contribute photos, information and stories. They can fact-check information the Palmers have come across, and contribute missing elements.

The other sections of the website, “Places” and “Context,” are dedicated to the history of the African American community in Central Virginia.

“You’re getting a sense of not just the individuals, but also the institutions they created; businesses, schools — and also places they were excluded as African Americans,” said Holloway Palmer.

A map takes the website visitor on a tour of important locations in African American History; places like the First African-American Baptist Church, which opened in 1841, and the tobacco factories of downtown Richmond, where the website says many of those buried at East End worked.

With inspiration from the website, the cleanups, and the exhibit, Brian Palmer wants communities to reconnect with their forgotten histories.

“There are hundreds of these places around the country — historic black cemeteries, native American cemeteries, paupers’ cemeteries,” Palmer said. “Stories are in these places that help us understand ourselves. We just have to look.

The Afterlife Of Jim Crow is on display at 1708 Gallery, located at 319 W. Broad St, until Saturday, March 23. For more information, go to 1708 Gallery’s website.

Photos by Brian Palmer and Erin Holloway Palmer, via 1708 Gallery

Virginia Communities, Legislators Breathe New Life into Preserving Black Cemeteries

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RICHMOND – On a hot Saturday in April, volunteers work under a bright sun and the noise of buzzing insects to find and remove unchecked nature and neglect from the graves of thousands of African-Americans, from everyday citizens to some of the most important leaders in local, state and national history.

The neighboring Evergreen and East End cemeteries serve as the final resting place of Maggie Walker, the first female bank president in the U.S.; John Mitchell, a newspaper publisher who risked his life to crusade for civil rights; and Rosa Dixon Bowser, founder of the Virginia State Teachers Association.

“When Black Richmond was the ‘Harlem of the South,’ when Jackson Ward was known as ‘Black Wall Street,’ these are the people who made those places,” said Brian Palmer of the Friends of East End Cemetery volunteer group.

Palmer

But the state of the burial grounds can be a stark contrast to the stature of the prominent figures buried there. Over the years, Evergreen, East End and many other black cemeteries across Virginia have fallen into disrepair, uncared for and unacknowledged. More recently, concerned residents have rallied to restore, record and maintain the history of the many laid to rest.

“It is not, shall we say, stunningly beautiful to someone who is more familiar with cemeteries like Hollywood [where Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, is buried], or the Confederate section of Oakwood, but to us, it is remarkable,” Palmer said of the work accomplished in East End since community efforts increased in 2013.

Across the commonwealth, volunteers like Palmer labor to restore the state’s African-American cemeteries, shining a light on a part of Virginia’s history often overshadowed by the legacy of the Confederacy. In recent years, these volunteers have seen support from a new source: the Virginia General Assembly, which has approved state funding for cleaning up and maintaining several of these cemeteries.

East End and Evergreen, on the line between Richmond and Henrico County, were the first African-American cemeteries in Virginia to receive help from the state government. In 2017, House Bill 1547 was signed into law. It allowed qualifying charitable organizations to collect maintenance funds for the two cemeteries – $5 annually for every person interred who lived between January 1800 and January 1900.

This led to a wave of similar legislation in 2018, with five bills passing the General Assembly. Most of the bills focused on African-American cemeteries in specific locales – Charlottesville, Loudoun County and Portsmouth. In addition, HB 284 will extend state funding to every African-American cemetery established before 1900 and allow the caretakers of those sites to receive maintenance funds from the state.

Del. Delores McQuinn, D-Richmond, who introduced both pieces of legislation, said HB 284 was meant to clear up any ambiguities in HB 1547.

“This year,” McQuinn said, “we came back to say, ‘Let’s be clear: Localities have access to these funds.’”

Palmer remains ambivalent about the legislation; his group plans to meet with McQuinn to discuss it in greater detail. Friends of East End Cemetery, a nonprofit organization, had attempted to apply to receive state funding under HB 1547 but was unsuccessful.

Even without state support, members of the group remain focused on their work, a process of renewal where the number of volunteers can top 200, a donated wheelbarrow can be a huge boon and new discoveries are spotlighted on sites like FindAGrave.com.

Palmer first stepped into East End Cemetery in the summer of 2014 with his wife Erin while making a documentary. There, they encountered an armed hunting group who said they had permission to use the grounds. (Later, Palmer said he contacted the previous owner, who contradicted this claim.)

The following year, the Palmers joined in the volunteer efforts, helping to rediscover and archive the names of people buried there more than a century ago. State officials say East End Cemetery has nearly 4,900 graves that qualify for assistance and Evergreen has 2,100.

“We’ve had quite a few groups out here,” said John Shuck, a volunteer at East End and Evergreen since 2008. The two cemeteries have received help from college students, churches, and Henrico County government. “Get people coming back out, you know, in ones and twos, but it all helps.”

Similar signs of progress are evident in Evergreen Cemetery, which covers more area than East End. Evergreen’s larger scale is matched by both the size of its volunteer force and signs of disrepair.

While the grounds are visited by both tour groups and mountain bikers, Dr. Ted Maris-Wolf of the EnRichmond Foundation, Evergreen’s new owner, emphasizes the work done so far remains “a shoestring operation.” Visitors can see support for that statement: A number of memorials are broken or obscured by overgrowth, and piles of decades-old detritus, collected by workers, line some of the paths in the lower areas of the cemetery.

Maris-Wolf, formerly a professor at Virginia Union University, Randolph-Macon College and the University of Louisiana, described the potential effect of extra revenue as a “game changer, not only for us but for all the cemeteries that will receive state funding.”

Before 2017, there were attempts in the General Assembly to provide equity in state support for graveyard maintenance, but they failed. However, success has come at the municipal level, thanks largely to community organizing.

In 2015, the city of Charlottesville gave $80,000 to the Preservers of the Daughters of Zion Cemetery to support their work in the city-owned burial grounds. The group hopes to “restore the extant markers, to attempt to identify the many unknown burials and to share information about the known individuals buried at the historic cemetery,” alongside videos, audio tours and an active presence on social media.

“We are very encouraged by recent legislation to provide funding for the preservation” of their cemetery and other African-American burial grounds, the group wrote. “We are hopeful that everyone will have the opportunity to tell their stories of our shared history.”

The struggle to maintain this aspect of Virginia has been long and fraught, even as the state’s black cemeteries remain unknown to most residents of the commonwealth.

Dr. Michael Blakey, an anthropologist and professor at the College of William & Mary, describes cemeteries as “the first archaeologically observable symbolic behavior, a language of memorialization, at the origins of Homo sapiens.”

“Thus, especially in slavery but for all people, cemeteries and mortuary ritual assert our humanity – human dignity – just as their desecration represents its denial.”

This is echoed by Dr. Lynn Rainville in a 2013 article published in the Journal of Field Archeology. Documenting her research into the topic in Albemarle County, Rainville described multiple black burial grounds throughout the area, neglected and overlooked due in part to housing development, racial shifts in local demographics leading to an absence in maintenance, vandalism and “inconsistencies in state laws.”

The result of this lack of care and gap in public awareness is evident even among the volunteers.

Robyn Young, along with her husband James Atkins and their daughter Cameron, continues to help reclaim East End as part of the Midlothian chapter of Jack & Jill of America. But she was struck by the fact “that I can’t find family members buried in these cemeteries for either of us,” despite being Richmond natives.

Story and Photos By George Copeland Jr. and Thomas Jett via VCU Capital News Service

Black Union Soldiers Remembered By American Civil War Museum

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At least four of the 180,000 African American soldiers who fought for the Union were buried in either East End or Evergreen cemetery on the outskirts of Richmond. Their stories were forgotten, in part because of the Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised Black Richmonders and their burial grounds.

Two journalists, Brian and Erin Hollaway Palmer, brought some of those stories to life Monday night at The Camel, for 60 attendees of a History Happy Hour sponsored by the American Civil War Museum, titled “Freedom Fighters at Rest.” The theme and timing coincide with Black History Month.

Sean Kane Programs Specialist From ACWM

The Palmers became interested in local graveyards after Brian discovered his great-grandfather, Matthew Palmer, was buried in Camp Peary, near Williamsburg. Matthew had served in the 115th Regiment during the Civil War, in one of the many regiments of the United States Colored Troops (USCT), named during a time when the offensive term colored was in wide use.

Brian knew his father had grown up in Magruder, an unincorporated community where many African Americans lived following the Civil War before the Army displaced them to make Camp Peary during World War II. He was able to visit and see the grave of his ancestor, but that was the end of his story. Like many of the African American soldiers, Matthew had been enslaved before the war, and records for him and many other men were conflicting, contradictory, or non-existent.

The Palmers relocated to Richmond, from their home in Brooklyn, and began work on two ambitious projects: The first to document the classified site known as Camp Peary, and the second, to uncover and reveal the stories of local men and women buried in East End Cemetery.

The stories of soldiers they found gave them a little insight into Brian’s great-grandfather, from the extraordinary life of William I. Johnson to the more ordinary account of Henry Williams.

Johnson was a prominent and wealthy man when he died in 1938. The Palmers found his story in the Work Projects Administration, which he shared in 1937, a year before his death at 98. He recounted growing up, being traded from home to home, and witnessing acts of torture at neighbors homes that shocked him. Even families that didn’t use torture “thought nothing of breaking up a family and selling the children,” Johnson said to his interviewer.

“Virginia WPA narratives were more accurate because African Americans interviewed the subjects, instead of the descendants of slave owners doing the interviews,” Brian said, as he described reasons Johnson’s narrative was credible.

While Matthew Palmer never became rich, Brian theorized that he probably joined the Union army the same way that Johnson had, at the urging of Union soldiers held prisoner near the men.

“They explained to us about slavery and freedom,” Brian read from Johnson’s account. “They told us if we got a chance to steal away from camp and got over on the Yankee’s side we would be free. They said if we win, all your colored folks will be free, but if the “Rebels” win you will always be slaves.”

Henry Williams of the 51st, Henry Wheaton of the 62nd, and Coleman Smith of the 27th Regiment were the other three soldiers buried in East End or Evergreen. Williams led a mostly ordinary life in comparison to Johnson, and conflicting records place him at both East End and Evergreen, but a letter suggests Evergreen.

Wheaton served under Lieut. Col. David Branson, a notoriously tough commander who didn’t tolerate idle soldiers. When he entered the war his signature was a crude X; under Branson, he learned to read and write, and the Palmers have found documents archived with his handwriting.

The final man, Smith, is mostly documented only in his pension application, made long after the war when he was 82. Part of the pension process required documentation of age, which wasn’t easy for most of the men; they had no birth certificates or records, as they were legally considered property.

Smith claimed his age was 82, with a family anecdote to support it. Seventy years prior, he had helped his father, an engineer, and other men with dangerous work on the James River; after one particularly risky moment, another man asked his age, and his father affirmed he was only 12. He kept count from that day forward.

Brian and Erin continue to seek information on Camp Peary, and have made connections with other historians and archivists as they hunt for the story of Matthew Palmer. They know he was in Texas at the close of the war, but the official record ends there.

“We spoke with a historian who thinks he followed the path of other men before him,” Erin said. “Taking a boat to New Orleans, then heading to Charlotte probably.” Matthew’s story may end there, but for Brian and Erin, their work has just begun. They’re part of Friends of East End Cemetery, a local group that meets at the burial site every Saturday to uncover the history of the men and women buried there.

The two have found nearly 2,900 graves since they began this project, but it’s taken a long time for Brian to feel optimistic, he said. “Erin knew it from the beginning, but not me. I would pull vines and go home feeling angry. But now I see opportunity. Every headstone we uncover is a victory.”

 

Volunteers Work to Restore East End Cemetery for Martin Luther King Jr. Day Of Service

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While many Americans used the holiday to kick back or play golf, others spent Martin Luther King Jr. day volunteering as part of a national day of service.

In Richmond, nearly 100 volunteers used the day off to do restoration work at the East End Cemetery, a historic Black cemetery on the Henrico border. The cemetery, established in 1897 next to Evergreen Cemetery, is the final resting place for an estimated 17,000 Richmonders, including many famous figures from the turn of the 20th century.

Kappa PI Military Sorority members

Some 100 volunteers came out, including several women from Kappa Epsilon Psi, the military sorority made up of veterans and active duty women soldiers. This was their second time at the annual Martin Luther King Jr cleanup, now in its 3rd year, but the Friends of East End Cemetery host weekly cleanups every Saturday.

“People usually talk about the prominent folks here, like Richard Tancil, a doctor born as a slave, but regular folks are buried here too, and their churches, employee groups, families, funded this,” said Brian Palmer, a member of the Friends of East End Cemetery, during the event. He and Erin Palmer, his wife, have been active members of the group since 2014.

Kids clean Thelma Callahan’s headstone, which they found

The cemetery is in disrepair; many headstones lay flat, and the grounds are overgrown with English ivy and choking vines. Brian Palmer, who wrote an op-ed for us on the cemetery last June, told us why the cemetery fell into neglect.

“There are misconceptions about why these cemeteries are in this condition,” he said, briefly running through the many ways people of color were discriminated against and disenfranchised following Reconstruction. “Jim Crow knocked this cemetery into a coma. The laws starved these places of resources that went to Confederate monuments and cemeteries, and without the right to vote, people couldn’t do anything about it.”

Matt and Naomi (passenger)

Erin Palmer estimates that they’ve cleared 4.5 acres out of 12.5 acres suitable for burial on the site, which contains a 3.5-acre ravine. In total, they’ve uncovered some 3,000 headstones and temporary courtesy markers, and found the stories of thousands of Richmonders that seemed lost to history. “Sometimes, we have five volunteers plus the regulars; sometimes we have 50; sometimes we have 100 plus, like today,” she said.

Brian Palmer, a photographer, shoots the memorials to share on Instagram and for international reach on findagrave.com. The site hosts 3,815 images from East End Cemetery. On their own website, the group posts the stories of the people whose graves they’ve photographed. “We’re doing two things,” he said. “We’re physically reclaiming the space and reclaiming the history.”

Vine removal preserves trees

“We do this every Saturday, but it matters on this particular day that we are in this cemetery, which was built out of love in response to hate,” he said, referencing the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. “This is a tremendous historical asset for the city of Richmond and the country, and love is what is going to save it.”

Photos by Brian Palmer

State will help fund clean up of historic African American cemeteries

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Hollywood Cemetery flaunts pristine iron gates, beautiful mausoleums and monuments, and majestic views of the James River. This gorgeous scenery is sorely lacking at two other historic cemeteries less than 15 minutes down the road.

When created in the 1800s, Evergreen and East End cemeteries were envisioned as high-end resting places for important African-American figures, just as James Monroe, Jefferson Davis, and other prominent Caucasians were buried at Hollywood Cemetery.

But today, the African-American graveyards are far from high end. They are marred by cracked headstones, broken fences and overgrown vegetation stretching to the tops of the trees. At Evergreen and East End, rest in peace is more like rest in distress.

The condition of these gravesites could change when House Bill 1547 takes effect July 1. Introduced by Del. Delores McQuinn of Richmond, the new law will distribute funds to organizations to assist with the cleanup of “historical African-American cemeteries and graves.”

McQuinn has long had an interest in the cemeteries; she has relatives buried there. She said she appreciates the efforts of volunteers who have worked to spruce up the gravesites.

“I am grateful for the many volunteers and interest that people have taken into helping to maintain to the point that it’s presentable,” McQuinn said.

HB 1547 will benefit cemeteries that were established before 1900 for the interment of African-Americans and are owned by a governmental entity or nonprofit group. Under the law, the state will help cover the cost of maintaining such sites. Eligible cemeteries will receive at least $5 for each grave, monument or marker for an individual “who lived at any time between January 1, 1800, and January 1, 1900.”

East End Cemetery in Henrico County has 4,875 graves that qualify for assistance; Evergreen Cemetery in Richmond has 2,100.

John Shuck is the site coordinator for the East End Cemetery Cleanup and Restoration Project and the assistant coordinator for a similar effort at Evergreen Cemetery. Shuck had come across the cemeteries while exploring his interest in genealogy more than nine years ago.

Shuck said beautifying the cemeteries is a long-term commitment.

“The first thing you do when you go in there is clear it, but then you have to maintain what you clear. That’s what we’re hoping some of these funds will do,” Shuck said.

The two cemeteries hold the remains of African-Americans who had a significant impact on Richmond, Virginia and the nation. They include pioneering business leaders Maggie Walker and Hezekiah F. Johnathan and crusading newspaper editor John Mitchell.

Given the stature of such figures, how did the cemeteries fall into a state of neglect?

Shuck attributed the lack of attention to the migration of black families up north for jobs during the Depression, leaving no one to care for the graves.

But many people believe race also was a factor.

“I don’t think that the interest nor the commitment was made to that cemetery like Hollywood Cemetery received,” McQuinn said.

Gov. Terry McAuliffe made that point when he signed HB 1547 on May 17. He said the new law will remedy a long-standing injustice. “Unlike Confederate cemeteries, black gravesites have gone centuries without state funds allocated for their maintenance and preservation,” he said.

McAuliffe said the state has made annual payments to maintain Confederate gravesites. In addition, in 1914, the General Assembly appropriated $8,000 – the equivalent of $190,000 in today’s dollars – to improve Hollywood Cemetery. And in 1997, the state provided $30,000 to restore Confederate graves at Oakwood Cemetery, less than two miles from the dilapidated African-American cemeteries.

Under the new law, Evergreen and East End cemeteries finally will receive financial help, too. McQuinn has hopes of creating a “garden of reflection” where people can come to learn and connect with their history. That will take money, but McQuinn is optimistic it will materialize.
“I don’t have any doubt that we will get there,” she said.

Want to help? Here’s how

Evergreen and East End cemeteries need volunteers to help with cleanup and maintenance. If you want to volunteer or would like more information, contact Marvin Harris at [email protected] or John Shuck at jshuck @rocketmail.com.

Harris said he is thankful that several volunteers come out on a weekly basis to help with the maintenance. They include James Giles, Ron Hicks, Barney Lomax, George Nixon, Al Simmons, Al Smith and Ronald Wilson.

Words and photos By Chelsea Jackson via VCU Capital News Service