Uncovered: Historic Preservation Efforts Finally Turn to Black Cemetery
For years, Brooklyn Cemetery, a historic African American burial site, sat neglected beside an Athens, Georgia neighborhood. Now preservationists work to bring it back to life.
Hidden in the woods by an elementary school and a shopping center in Athens, Georgia sits a historic African American cemetery. Overlooked for years, the Athens community wants to restore it. Linda Davis, leader of the cemetery’s restoration, speaks to what it takes to restore the Brooklyn Cemetery.
“We decided early on that we weren’t gonna set up a nonprofit,” Davis says. “And when I hit knock on doors, this needed to be a community effort, because I didn’t want it to be something that we can get restored quickly. And then people, you know, stick a flag and say, it’s done. We needed for this to be done by the community.”
Brooklyn Cemetery’s overgrowth reveals a deeper problem in Athens. Black History has been ignored or destroyed.
“I think there is an equity issue here when we talk about preservation,” Davis continues. “So I do not feel that the black community’s contribution to this community to Athens or the country or the automation is recognized or celebrated. I think we have continued to erase our culture and erase the ugliness of the behavior toward our culture, through the things that we preserve.”
Although Black historic spaces have been ignored in the past, Tommy Valentine, director of Historic Athens, expresses a change in Athens initiative to preserve not ignore black history. He explains how his 2019 Places of Peril list helped increase interest.
“We’ve seen an increased passion in this community for African American heritage,” Valentine reveals. “And that’s been reflected in the nominations we’ve received and ultimately the list we’ve produced.”
Despite volunteer efforts underway, Brooklyn Cemetery has ways to go in its long term goals.
“So the things that are missing right now are we don’t have our fencing, we do want to fence the cemetery, and we want to isolate it from the community, and kind of separate it from the community,” Davis says.
With all these efforts that Linda and her volunteers do, there is a purpose for Linda that drives her to complete this project; Davis’s dream to reconnect with her grandparents whose bodies have been lost over the years.
“So that is one of the things that drives me in my work in the cemetery is that we didn’t have the means to build those, or to purchase those headstones that would have made a more permanent marker for her and my grandfather and my aunt, who I know were buried together in the cemetery,” reveals Davis.
