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Slave Cemetery Found Under Florida Country Club Opens Wounds

Slave Cemetery Found Under Florida Country Club Opens Wounds

slave
(Wikimedia Commons)

There are an estimated 10,000–20,000 slave cemeteries in the United States. Add one more to that list. A slave cemetery was recently discovered under Tallahassee, Fla.’s, semi-private Capital Country Club.  The nearly 23,000 square-foot course was designed more than 100 years ago. 

The Capital City Country Club is located on what was once the grounds of a 500-acre plantation. An archaeological investigation has revealed there is a slave cemetery containing 40 graves beneath the seventh fairway of its golf course.

“The graves were found thanks to the combined efforts of Delaitre Hollinger, the immediate past president of the Tallahassee chapter of the NAACP, and Jeffrey Shanks, a park service archaeologist,” Newsweek reported.

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“When I stand here on a cemetery for slaves, it makes me thoughtful and pensive,” said Hollinger to the Associated Press. “They deserve much better than this. And they deserved much better than what occurred in that era.”

Currently, there are no plans to exhume the bodies — and there may be more bodies yet to be discovered. 

“It’s a really serious problem,” Shanks said of the burial ground. “It’s not just a Florida problem. It’s really a problem across the Southeast.”

“Shanks said the discovery is noteworthy because many slaves were buried in unmarked graves where their existence was lost to history. They were regarded by their masters as property, whose lives and deaths occurred unceremoniously. There are thought to be up to 1,500 unmarked slave and African-American cemeteries spread across the Sunshine State,” The New York Daily News reported.

“They were nameless on census records, and they are nameless and unremembered in death,” historian Jonathan Lammers said to the AP. “It’s safe to say that there are thousands upon thousands of these graves in Leon County and hundreds and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, across the Southeast that remain unknown today.”