Text message claims Tampa’s Italian Club destroyed Black, Cuban cemetery

TAMPA — Who erased College Hill Cemetery and its more than 1,200 graves for early Black and Cuban residents?

The answer might be in a text message from a retired city employee to a friend.

Sometime after 1941, the cemetery disappeared.

According to property records, it was located on the land that today is a parking lot for the Italian Club Cemetery.

A few weeks ago, someone shared a text message with Tampa City Council member Gwen Henderson, whose District 5 includes the East Tampa cemetery land at 2520 E. 24th Ave. With permission and a promise that she would not name the friend or retired employee, Henderson then shared it with the Tampa Bay Times.

According to the message, the Italian Club knowingly destroyed College Hill Cemetery, and one of their leaders boasted about it.

Henderson said she trusts the source of the information.

“I believe it took a lot of courage,” she said. “The person who is recalling this text is sick to their stomach and very upset.”

Italian Club Vice President Don Bodie said it was difficult to respond to an unnamed source who didn’t provide evidence. “There is no way we would be moving grave markers,” he said via email. “In fact we have the opposite responsibility of perpetual care. … Is it possible that this person is referring to City-owned land nearby where the City excavated its own land.”

That city-owned land would be a neighboring retention pond.

But local and federal records show a cemetery on the land that later became the Italian Club Cemetery parking lot. Nothing shows a cemetery was on the neighboring property.

The Times first identified that parking lot property as the possible College Hill Cemetery site in 2019 and wrote a more detailed report in 2021. In February 2023, the Times witnessed ground-penetrating radar being rolled across the property. The radar could indicate whether graves are there or have been moved, but the club has not commented on the findings to the Times or to the city.

“This new development is rather sickening and disgusts me,” said Angela Alderman Wynn, whose great-uncle was buried in College Hill Cemetery. “The Italian Club has continued to avoid any details of my great-uncle’s remains and the 1,200 alongside him.”

The text message

A printed copy of the text message (with names cut out by Henderson) reads: “Whenever I think of horror cemetery stories I think of (NAME REDACTED) saying yeah when we were putting in our driveway/parking area at the Italian Club cemetery there were gravestones (from when it was a black cemetery) flying all over the place I think I got a couple of them in the back room, I said to (REDACTED) our intern who was with me at the time, that information dies with us.”

The retired city employee sent the message on July 18, 2021, Henderson said.

Five days before that, the Times published a story about a historic marker to denote the location of College Hill Cemetery.

Henderson said that she was told the text recalled words spoken by an Italian Club leader in the late 1990s or early 2000s, when the Ybor City social club was working with the city to have the 5-acre Italian Club Cemetery listed as a historic landmark. News archives say that work happened in 2000, but the cemetery never received that local status.

If true, this incident would constitute a third-degree felony in Florida. It also could redefine the Italian Club Cemetery, which has been highlighted as a symbol of inclusion because it contains burial sites for two prominent Black families — the Armwoods and the Hollomans — alongside Italians.

The Italian Club has maintained that the Armwoods sold them the cemetery property, but land records say otherwise.

The history

The 1-acre College Hill Cemetery, also known as Cottage Hill Cemetery, was established in 1889, five years before the Italian Club was founded. College Hill Cemetery’s Black section was created by the “Nickle Club of Tampa for colored people,” according to land records.

The Armwood and Holloman death records from that era list College Hill Cemetery and make no mention of the Italian Club.

In 1908, the Italian Club began assembling their cemetery land by purchasing pieces of it from at least three other property owners over decades, according to land records. None of those property owners were the Armwoods.

In the mid-1920s, Tampa expanded into the College Hill neighborhood and levied improvement taxes on the property owners. Those who could not pay had their land taken and sold. Historians believe College Hill Cemetery was such a property.

A 1941 federal report says College Hill Cemetery was still there. Over the next nine years, the land was owned by several individuals, including future Tampa Mayor Nick Nuccio and then Joseph Puglisi, who sold it to the Italian Club in 1950.

Aerial photographs show that trees were cleared from the College Hill Cemetery land by 1968. A mausoleum was built, and the driveway was added in the 1970s.

In December 2020, a tipster told the Times that bodies were moved to the land that later became the city-owned retention pond neighboring the College Hill Cemetery. Then, in May 2021, two siblings told the Times about finding a mass grave after climbing into that retention pond as it was being dug in the 1970s.

“The Italian Club actually has the answers,” Henderson said. “But if they say it out loud and admit it, that means that they have to do something about it and then therein lies the privilege and selfishness of the matter.”

The redactions

Henderson redacted the name to further protect the identity of the retired city employee. But why remove the name of the person who allegedly said the words?

“I don’t know who it is,” Henderson said. “I get the sense that this person is very popular and very powerful. I don’t know if they’re living or dead.”

Henderson is now calling for those with knowledge of the alleged incident to step forward with more information. And, if the Italian Club says they did it, she will forgive them.

“That’s what the Bible tells us to do,” Henderson said. “You can’t really pick and choose. Historically, just being born of African descent, a lot of our history requires me to constantly turn over my thoughts and be forgiving.”