Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 25, 1994 TAG: 9406280094
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Short
By developers. By vandals. Even by new owners of old homes when they innocently plow a new garden and discover a family cemetery.
Some of the hardest hit are black cemeteries like Springwood Burial Park. Without big monuments and perpetual care, they stand little chance of fending off Mother Nature and human indifference.
Protecting old black graveyards is a cause for Janis Hutchinson, an anthropologist at the University of Houston.
She has organized a communitywide crusade there to restore Evergreen Negro Cemetery. It dates to the 1890s and is Houston's third-oldest cemetery.
Development tends to avoid white cemeteries but plows right through ones for black people and Native Americans, she said. Those frequently have unmarked graves and are tucked ``back in the boondocks.''
She's trying to start a nationwide census of black graveyards.
In Houston, she's gotten city government to bring out its big lawn mowers to clear Evergreen. Individual burial sites have been ``adopted'' by students committed to keeping them clean.
She said Roanokers need to watch out that no one moves bodies out of Springwood Burial Park unless families concur. ``The people in the community need to get organized to push so that doesn't happen,'' she said.
One other bit of advice from her:
``If there are Buffalo Soldiers there,'' she said, referring to the famous black cavalry unit of the 1870s, ``that could help them qualify as an historic site.''
by CNB