In death, Miami’s black pioneers deserve the dignity denied them in life

Down a forgotten street in a forgotten neighborhood sits a forgotten place.

And no, that’s not entirely fair. The people who live and conduct business in Brownsville, who have loved ones interred at Lincoln Memorial Park Cemetery, would likely protest that they have forgotten nothing.

It’s a fair point.

But so is this. In the condo towers downtown where construction cranes perch like giant metallic grasshoppers, on the sparkling bay where motorboats and Jet Skis duel incoming waves, down the tony streets of Coral Gables where the elite meet to eat and drink as breezes serenade the palm fronds, in all the showcase places that signify in the public mind all that Miami is, one would likely be hard pressed to find anyone who knows anything about this broken-down graveyard signifying all that Miami was.

Meaning, a segregated Southern town where black people lived and moved largely unseen, and where the racial mores of the Jim Crow era were enforced by the law, the fist and the gun.

Lincoln is the final resting place for an estimated 10,000 to 30,000 African Americans, lynching victims and millionaires alike, pressed together in the equality of their legal inequality. Nearly a hundred years after its first burials, the graveyard is a misbegotten jumble of tombs, the names of occupants scrubbed away by years of sun and storm.

So closely are the stone boxes pressed together that two recent burials required a forklift and crane to situate the new tombs. So tightly are they jammed in that there is virtually no way to walk between them; a visitor must walk on top of them instead. Weeds stand tall, and the place is ringed about by a perimeter of detritus — the box from a 12-pack of Coke, a kitty litter bag, an empty cigar packet.

Which only adds to the impression that this is a forgotten place.

But beginning Aug. 3, the Coral Gables Museum invites us to remember. On that day and continuing until Nov. 6, an exhibit called “Sacred Ground: The Rise, Fall and Revival of Lincoln Memorial Park Cemetery” will take up residence at the museum. Through a display of telegrams, video, artifacts, historical documents and images from photographers including Carl Juste and C.W. Griffin, the museum will tell the story of the cemetery, its citizens and the Miami they knew.

It’s a necessary tale. As John Allen, the museum’s executive director points out, “I’m a third generation Miamian and I had never heard of this cemetery before.”

He was introduced to it by Malcolm Lauredo, the museum’s director of historic research and lead historian, who himself stumbled across the graveyard years ago on an aimless late night drive. “The first time I was there,” says Allen, “I stepped on a vertebrae, looked inside a casket and had a femur staring up at me coming out of a suit jacket.” It seems the cemetery had become something of an easy mark for grave robbers seeking bones for religious ceremonies.

In that sense, the tale of Lincoln Memorial is not yet a success story, not yet a story of the ragged and unkempt made to shine like new. Yes, the grave robberies are said to have declined, but make no mistake, the place is still a mess.

But if this isn’t a success story, it is a story of progress, as embodied by the cemetery’s self-appointed caretaker, Arthur Kennedy, who, in conjunction with the museum, is slowly reclaiming it from years of neglect. In so doing, they hope to restore to some of Miami’s pioneers something African Americans are too often denied: the dignity of memory.

“Miami, just like a lot of other places in United States history, has sort of been whitewashed,” says Lauredo. “There’s a lot of people who were really cornerstones in shaping what Miami is today: D.A. Dorsey, the first African-American millionaire in Miami. You have Kelsey Pharr, who was a prominent mortician, he founded the first chapter of Boy Scouts for African Americans in South Florida. We have Gwen Cherry, the first African-American woman elected to the Legislature, we have H.E.S. Reeves, who founded the Miami Times. So there’s a lot of luminaries and important Miami pioneers that you don’t talk about — and I think it’s really important that they have representation in the history of the city that they helped found, just as much as Henry Flagler and Julia Tuttle.”

Not that prominent people doing prominent things are the only ones interred here. As noted, segregation forced black people together, both in life and in death. Allen is taken with a group of telegrams the museum unearthed, asking the dean of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to put a certain student on a train home to Miami immediately.

“Her mother had died here in Miami, but ‘Please don’t tell her she’s dead yet. We’ll tell her when she gets here.’ There’s a lot of stuff like that,” he says of the material the museum has amassed. “It’s very intimate. It brings it home. Young children drowning in the Coral Gables canal, sailors that died aboard ships and how they stored the bodies until they could get them home to port. All of a sudden, you’re picturing these people. Some of these houses where these people died, they’re still standing, and they died in 1928, 1929.”

The people buried at Lincoln are not, to be sure, the only ones denied memory. There are other urban cemeteries in South Florida — indeed, across the country — where the only caretaker is neglect, and African Americans lie in forgotten repose. Earlier this month, a backhoe operator stumbled upon a femur while working on the site of a new school near Houston.

It turned out to be the final resting place of 95 African Americans, victims of a forced labor prison — de facto slavery — during the Jim Crow era.

Apparently, everybody forgot they were there.

America forgets such things because they are easy to forget. And we forget them because they are necessary to forget, because they give the lie to our national mythology. America has to forget them because otherwise, how can you gaze upon the construction cranes, how can you feel the Jet Ski spray, how can you hear the rustle of the leaves in the palm fronds, in quite the same innocent and oblivious way?

Against the seduction of amnesia, the Coral Gables Museum offers the hard duty of memory, a chapter from a story yet in progress, a tale of what lies in a too-often forgotten place down a too-often forgotten street in a too-often forgotten neighborhood.

This is Lincoln Memorial Park Cemetery, final resting place to the millionaire, the lynching victim and the mother of the Tuskegee student. Here, a shopping cart sits abandoned in the weeds. Here, the fence sags under the weight of its years. But here, too, fresh bouquets of red and gold flowers adorn a few of the tombs. And small American flags hang limply in the posts of that tired fence, their faded colors barely stirred by the breeze.