This investigation by ProPublica is really shocking. Archaeological surveys intended to protect historic Black cemeteries are not as useful as they seem. Surveys are required by the state of Virginia for any construction site, such as big solar projects. But they are ignored or minimized by developers whose goal is to get their projects finished, one way or another.
As a result, historical sites, including Black cemeteries and other Black family sites, risk being erased. Large-scale developers, including big solar, tend to see them as inconvenient obstacles to completing their projects.
ProPublica reported that this happened in Mecklenburg County, where a historically Black family cemetery was moved, even though it qualified to be included on the National Register of Historic Places. Developers did the bare minimum to contact family members, who would have flagged the historic value of the site. Instead, the family graves in this old cemetery were unceremoniously and disrespectfully removed to another location.
–Photo credit, Christopher Smith, special to ProPublica
As ProPublica wrote,
“African American cemeteries that are deemed abandoned or untended have routinely been treated as little more than a nuisance in the path to development. Historic preservation laws and regulations rarely protect them.”
Nobody working to bring a $346 million Microsoft project to rural Virginia expected to find graves in the woods. But in a cluster of yucca plants and cedar that needed to be cleared, surveyors happened upon a cemetery. The largest of the stones bore the name Stephen Moseley, “died December 3, 1930,” in a layer of cracking plaster. Another stone, in near perfect condition and engraved with a branch on the top, belonged to Stephen’s toddler son, Fred, who died in 1906.
“This is not as bad as it sounds,” an engineering consultant wrote in March 2014 to Microsoft and to an official in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, who was helping clear hurdles for the project — an expansion of a massive data center. “We should be able to relocate these graves.”
#racialjustice