Black Burial Grounds Are Disappearing as Families Fight to Protect Them

The first time Terry O’Neal walked into an old cemetery, she found splintered coffins pushed up by storms and time, with “skeletons sitting outside of caskets.” In Chloe, Louisiana, the acre that holds generations of Black, Creole, and Indigenous families looked more like an abandoned field than a resting place, she recalled. 

The neglect in death felt intentional to her, and increasingly more urgent as attacks on Black burial grounds have spread across the South in recent years.

“Black achievements and our lives have been stolen and hidden since the beginning of this country,” she said. “It is like we are not meant to know our greatness.”

As Black burial grounds have been paved over, sold off, or left to disappear under weeds, across the South, Black people learn early that death does not guarantee rest. In the same vein, Black love — and responsibility — does not stop at the grave. O’Neal is among a growing network of hundreds of Black people doing the work of saving historic, and often forgotten, cemeteries.

Descendants are organizing cleanups, filing lawsuits, and pressing cities to acknowledge the dead beneath their feet.

In recent years, researchers and grassroots groups have launched national efforts to locate long‑forgotten Black cemeteries and unmarked graves, even as attacks on historic Black burial sites — from vandalism to outright desecration — have grown more visible and more brazen.

In Palmetto, Florida, this battle was made clear last month after 17 graves in a historically Black cemetery were vandalized. Headstones were spraypainted with far‑right slogans and politicians’ names linked to white supremacist movements. 

“It takes a real sick individual to come out here in this graveyard and break over people’s graves and spray paint people’s graves,” said Joseph Roberts, who has several family members buried at the Old Memphis Cemetery, which was established in 1904 for Black residents ​of Palmetto’s Memphis neighborhood. 

Since 2020, dozens of Black cemeteries across the South have been desecrated, had headstones and plaques stolen, areas around graves set on fire, and headstones graffitied with phrases like “AIDS” and “[Charlie] Kirk.”

“These are people’s loved ones; this is sacred. It’s truly disrespectful,” Roberts said. 

President Donald Trump’s name was one of the phrases painted in bright-red across some graves in Florida last month. A White House spokesperson said, “Anyone who engages in ​this disgusting behavior ⁠must be condemned in the harshest terms possible.” Days after the attack, Manatee County, where Palmetto is located, approved up to $100,000 for restoration and security efforts.  

Still, there are deep psychological traumas associated with this destruction. Studies show that grief, for many Black families, stretches far beyond the nuclear household and often unfolds across generations. Black families are more likely to grieve not only parents and children, but ancestors, cousins, godmothers, church elders, and neighbors who feel like kin. Research shows that Black families carry these losses longer and more intensely than white families. 

It is a pattern that helps explain why Black families fight so fiercely for their burial grounds.

“Our loved ones live short, hard, interrupted lives,” O’Neal said. “So families cling to what they can control” by continuing to honor the lives of the deceased through conversations in prayers, dreams, and cemetery visits.

A growing trend: Industrial development over Black burial sites 

O’Neal’s current journey to save the old cemetery started with a name on a family tree and turned into a mission inside the woods outside Chloe, a small rural community in Calcasieu Parish.

She had been tracing her lineage for years before she realized how many of her people were buried there, and how few of them anyone could still find. Somewhere in a tangle of trees and crushed graves is her great‑grandmother. 

Perhaps most difficult for O’Neal to reckon with is the fact that many of the issues that plague Black people during their lives also show up in their deaths. 

“How do you know who you can become, how do you know who you are, unless you really know the greatness that was behind you,” she said about the significance of remembering her ancestors. 

The Chloe cemetery sits on land her family secured through homestead patents after emancipation, where her third- and fourth-great-grandfathers carved out 160 acres. Records show the site has served as a resting place for enslaved people since at least the mid‑1800s and later for Black, Creole, and Native American families tied to the LeBleu settlement along English Bayou. 

But over time, industry remade the landscape. The area is home to dozens of oil refineries, chemical plants, and now massive logistics and data facilities. Cancer rates in the area are higher than the national average, and the life expectancy is lower.

And the same forces that hemmed people in with plants, pipelines, and highways in life are now closing in on their resting places, turning Black cemeteries into collateral damage for the next wave of development.

Just up the road, Amazon has purchased a large parcel of land near the rural community, as part of a larger push to build data center campuses and logistics facilities across Louisiana. 

O’Neal said she and other descendants have watched other companies build on top of graveyards. 

A few hours away in southeastern Louisiana, another Black community and its burial sites are under threat. A proposed ordinance would redesignate Romeville for industrial use, threatening the Pleasant Hill Cemetery and the Colomb Plantation Cemetery, which likely contains the graves of formerly enslaved people whose descendants still live nearby. Community groups Inclusive Louisiana, Mount Triumph Baptist Church, and RISE St. James are currently embroiled in a federal lawsuit to block their ancestors’ graves — and their current homes — from being lost to pollution and development. 

“Our ancestors survived slavery, built communities from nothing, purchased land, built churches, raised families, and created a legacy that still lives today in Romeville,” said Inclusive Louisiana co-founders Gail LeBoeuf and Barbara Washington. “To now threaten those same sacred spaces for industrial expansion is a continuation of the same system that has treated Black lives and Black land as disposable for generations.” 

Watching what is happening elsewhere — paired with an adjacent landowner’s plans to sell — made O’Neal speed up efforts before new construction makes the cemetery even more vulnerable. 

She has reached out to Amazon about partnering on the restoration. In a statement, Austin Stowe, an Amazon spokesperson said the company is “inspired by the work being done to restore and preserve Chloe Cemetery and look forward to exploring ways we can potentially support the effort.”

The journey to find lost Black cemeteries 

Over the past several months O’Neal has been organizing volunteers to cut paths through the woods, place temporary markers, and reestablish the boundaries of the cemetery. By clearing and cleaning up the space, it will be ready for ground‑penetrating radar technology to help locate lost graves and for legal protection if an industrial developer attempts to come through. 

Among those volunteers is Jed Duhon, a 65‑year‑old roofer who has been spending his days hacking a way back into the graveyard. In places, the canopy and underbrush close in so tightly that volunteers only see a headstone or sinking vault once they are almost standing on it. It is “hard to describe,” he said, “until you actually lay eyes on it and get into this jungle and then you walk up on a grave.” 

The work is strenuous, he said, as he explained how he spends hours swinging machetes through walls of overgrowth. They cannot use machinery because of the unmarked graves. Here and there, he has found traces of just how long this ground has held the dead — like a weathered headstone carved for someone who died in the 1870s.

Most exciting to O’Neal is what comes after the ground is walkable. She has brought in a forensic specialist who spent decades restoring storm-damaged cemeteries for local governments. His team will sweep the site with ground‑penetrating radar and metal detectors, reading waves bounced back from the soil to locate unmarked graves and the edges of burial clusters. Ground‑penetrating radar has become a standard tool in this kind of work because it is noninvasive and accurate at identifying disturbed earth and voids where coffins once sat, allowing descendants to map burial grounds that never had formal plats. 

What O’Neal is doing in Southwest Louisiana mirrors a wider national movement. 

In 2021, researchers at the University of South Florida launched the Black Cemetery Network, an interactive map and clearinghouse that has grown from an initial handful of cases to more than 150 documented historic Black cemeteries and burial grounds across at least 20 states and Washington, D.C. Many were rediscovered when descendants noticed that housing developments, parking lots, or industrial sites sat atop places older residents remembered as graveyards. The network connects families with archaeologists, genealogists, and legal advocates, and it offers technical guidance ranging from archival research to how to hire a radar team.

Even with that support, the work is slow and often underfunded. Advocates estimate that there are likely tens of thousands of Black cemeteries across the country, many of them erased from official maps or displaced by highways and industrial projects. 

“But you just can’t give up on them. I can’t give up on it because I owe them that,” O’Neal said, “I owe my ancestors that.”

Read More:

• The Sacred Ground Where Black Americans Search for Their Roots
• Stolen Black Remains Return Home After 150 Years in European Vault
• S.C. Court Victory Grants Gullah Geechee Temporary Access to Blocked Cemetery

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