Uncovering Black cemeteries paved over in Florida | 60 Minutes

no one can say when human remains began surfacing in Clearwater Florida there was the pipeline crew that churned up bones in a trench later remains of the Dead were found at an elementary school a swimming pool and an office building it seemed like a curse for what had been done in the name of progress and greed in the old segregated South the truth of what happened in the 40s and 50s was meant to stay buried but in a neighborhood called Clearwater Heights residents with long memories recognized a grave Injustice the story will continue in a moment in the first half of the 20th century Clearwater Heights was a black neighborhood thriving proud and anchored by faith Friendship Missionary Baptist Church Bethany CME and New Zion Missionary Baptist Church were all located on the Heights and so is Saint Matthew's Baptist where we heard stories of childhood in the Heights including those of Diane Stevens and Eleanor Breeland they had businesses barber shops uh there were hairdressers over there there was a cab company that only had one cab but you'll still have company right there on Greenwood they had different places where even Ray Charles performed there also James Brown performed up there but even the famous could not stay in a white Clearwater hotel or walk on the beach or swim in the bay segregation bound their lives and exiled even their memory to segregated graveyards how many of you believe you have ancestors in one of these cemeteries about half of you the segregated cemeteries of Clearwater were sacred ground until the ground became valuable in the 1950s headlines announced that the city of Clearwater made a deal on moving a negro Cemetery hundreds of African-American bodies were to be reburied to make way for a swimming pool a department store was planned for the site of another black Cemetery where again the bodies were to be moved but O'Neill Larkin remembers many years later his first revelation that something was terribly wrong it's not an imaginary thing that I've seen it's what I seen with my own eyes Larkin 82 years old watched a construction crew in 1984 dig a trench through the site of a relocated black Cemetery but I remember um the parking lot where the engineers Trafford engineer was cutting the lines through and they cut through two coffins that was my first knowledge of seeing it because I walked out there and I seen it myself in 2019 the Tampa Bay Times reported many segregated cemeteries in Florida had been essentially paved it was then that the modern city of Clearwater decided to exhume the truth people deserve to be treated with respect that's the most important thing Rebecca O'Sullivan and Aaron McKendree are archaeologists for a company called cardno Cardinal was hired by the city to map the desecration these individuals were loved they were family members they were fathers and mothers and they were interred with love McKendree and O'Sullivan pushed ground penetrating radar over a segregated Cemetery where this office site stands today this overlay shows part of their Discovery 328 likely Graves many under the parking lot perhaps a few under the building and more there on the right beneath South Missouri Avenue 550 graves are in the cemetery's record McKendree and O'Sullivan found evidence of 11 having been moved in the 1950s so there may be hundreds of bodies still at that site it's possible not far away the archaeologists probed another former Cemetery where there's more of what looks like the impact looks great here in the 1950s rather than integrate the white community pool the city said it would move hundreds of bodies to build a black swimming pool and a black school but the bodies weren't removed the bodies were not removed cardino found the proof last year it excavated just deep enough to confirm what ground penetrating radar had suggested it is the resting place a prayer was said over the site then they planed the sand and sieved A Century Of Time In Search of grave markers or tributes inevitably relics included human remains teeth at the office building site and bones at the school which had closed in 2008 because it was obsolete are there grave sites underneath the school all of the information and the data that we collected does indicate that there are additional burials likely below the footprint of that school building very surprised O'Neill Larkin watched the excavation and imagined the groundbreaking at the school construction site in 1961. to dig the foundation to put this school upon they had to hit some form of remains it's likely some families could not afford a tombstone but the archaeologists found Graves were marked like one of those little black things this is a marker that would have been used initially after the burial if a stone was not ready to be placed and in some cases this is all that would have been used to Mark the location of a burial Aaron McKendree showed us Cardinal's catalog of evidence it's a Mercury Dime it is a Mercury Dime this dime new in 42 was among many tributes left with the dead we also found this brass wedding ring at approximately the same location and the same depth as the dime tributes and Disturbed human remains were carefully re-buried exactly where they were found pending a decision on what to do next if you could speak to these people who were interred and then lost what would you tell them I hear you I'm working I want to recognize the contributions the life you lived I recognize and see your Humanity the cheapest land the worst places Anthropologist Antoinette Jackson leads the African-American burial ground project at the University of South Florida she's building a database of desecrated cemeteries not just clear waters nationally from New York all the way out toward Texas and all the way down to South Florida where these cemeteries have been built over erased marginalized underfunded and need support in order to make make them whole and have this history known this is not not an isolated story unfortunately so far Jackson has listed about 70 of faced black cemeteries Nationwide underneath the current housing under housing freeways and the county-owned parking lot of Tropicana Field home to baseball's Tampa Bay Rays what we want to bring forward is the memory the knowledge that these sites were there these places these cemeteries these families were there lived died worked contributed to our country to their communities to our hometowns is there evidence of white cemeteries being lost abandoned forgotten in the way that these are there are abandoned cemeteries across the board there are cemeteries that are not only African-American cemeteries or black cemeteries that have been in some way desecrated but the issue is more acute with black cemeteries because of issues like slavery segregation in which this particular Community were legally and intentionally considered lesser than or marginalized by law when a cemetery disappears what is lost his history history respect great deal of respect because you can no longer visit all right and bring closure to your own soul a cemetery is supposed to be your final resting place honorable Place final in Clearwater they're debating how to honor those entombed beneath the school South Missouri Avenue and the property of the Frank Crum company which bought its headquarters for its Staffing business decades after the cemetery was erased I'm sure that when they purchased that property they didn't know that there were bodies there Debbie Atkinson heads the Clearwater NAACP what would you say to someone who might make the argument that disturbing Missouri Avenue disturbing the Frank Crum Corporation disturbing the schools way too much effort at this point in time I would say that that's not their call they have no family buried there Atkinson is helping lead the conversation of what to do now among descendants businesses and the City some people want to have their bodies moved to a place where they can properly memorialize them some of the descending Community wants to let the people stay where they are those are the type of things that need to be worked out how do you work them out we have to sit and talk about it I mean there is no easy answer with that whether the failure in the last century to move the graves was deceit incompetence or indifference we do not know but today clear water is spending two hundred and seventy thousand dollars to learn the truth the city told us it is searching for a compromise that will honor the Dead the Frank Crum company told us it wants to be part of the community's solution ideas include monuments but for a few like O'Neill Larkin there's only one route to Justice tear it down tear the building down tear it down tear down that building as far as I'm concerned scared let's tear the school down make it a shrine of a memories that people can go and use it in a proper way of remembering the treatment with more dignity than what this has been treated we noticed dignity was treated gently in the white cemeteries of clear water in this one we found a monument to a confederate soldier his grave decorated today with a fresh Banner of racism but when this Confederate sacred ground found itself blocking the road to progress the small Cemetery under those trees in the middle was granted a reverent circular detour of those citizens buried in the black cemeteries of Clearwater we have images of only these the Reverend Arthur L Jackson the Reverend Joseph Hines and Mac Dixon senior who was buried beside his wife Florence three children and two grandchildren we do not know the faces of 500 more who remained forever Bound by segregation and lost to the memory of time

Channel: 60 Minutes

Views: 1,427,156

Keywords: 60 Minutes, CBS News, black cemeteries, lost cemeteries, clearwater, florida, tampa bay, university of south florida

Id: sT9TaQcWcFs

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 28 2022