October 24, 2025
The Nationwide Park Service estimates there are a minimum of 23 confirmed unmarked graves and 14 attainable others.
In Tallahassee, a plan to promote a city-owned golf course constructed partially over the burial grounds of enslaved individuals has led to residents talking out on behalf of the useless.
The 178-acre web site of the Capital Metropolis Golf Course is lower than a mile from the state capitol. The Nationwide Park Service estimates a minimum of 23 confirmed unmarked graves and 14 attainable graves of enslaved individuals, the AP reported.
Residents and descendants of the enslaved are demanding recognition for these interred and a everlasting memorial relatively than a land sale.
“We all know they had been enslaved. However who had been they?” requested native resident Tiffany Hill.
The town initially proposed to promote the land to the Capital Metropolis Nation Membership for $1.25 million. The town’s solely situation to the sale is that the golf course stay an 18-hole facility and that town keep public entry for a commemorative web site.
Residents in opposition to the sale say the deal quantities to commodifying human stays. Moreover, activists warn that the continued lack of acknowledgement of the graves reduces the legacy of enslaved individuals to a footnote.
“They had been offered on the public sale blocks of Leon County, and now we’re keen to promote them once more,” stated activist Delaitre Hollinger on the Oct. 22 Metropolis Fee assembly.
Advocates for historic preservation say town’s failure to construct the memorial it authorized greater than 4 years in the past compounds the difficulty.
Florida State College historian Kathleen Powers Conti stated she was “frankly shocked that … nobody … is definitely trying to discover the descendants of these individuals buried there.”
Evidently, residents are displeased by the extended inaction. The town fee has postponed its last vote on the sale amid mounting public strain.
In 2020, metropolis officers in Ocoee, Florida, encountered the same state of affairs. The town initiated eminent-domain motion for a one-acre web site believed to comprise a historic African American cemetery. The location was rumored to probably be tied to the 1920 Ocoee bloodbath of Black residents. The property at 441 Basking Ridge Court docket carried a marker for “Hallowed Floor” as a result of discovery of two headstones. But, a ground-penetrating radar discovered no definitive proof of graves, WESH stories.
Within the Tampa space, forensic anthropologists working with the Florida Institute for Forensic Anthropology and Utilized Science uncovered proof for a minimum of 45 unmarked cemeteries hidden below parking tons, faculties, and housing developments. Most of the areas had been tied to African American communities. A few of these websites hint again to mid-Twentieth-century city renewal.
In 2019, a forgotten cemetery was uncovered in Hillsborough County. Beneath the Robles Park housing venture had been the stays of the previous Zion Cemetery. The stays had been largely Black our bodies. The identical yr, 145 coffins had been unearthed beneath a King Excessive College in Tampa. They had been what was left of the previous Ridgewood Cemetery. Whereas 145 stays had been discovered, historic information present that greater than 250 individuals had been interred there.
Based on Spectrum Information, King Excessive College erected a monument in 2023 to memorialize the individuals whose resting locations had been constructed over and destroyed as a casualty of capitalism.
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