FLORIDA Slave cemetery poses questions for country club
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The rumors swirled for decades: A dark history lay buried under the manicured lawns of a country club in Florida’s capital city.
Over the years, neat rows of rectangular depressions along the seventh fairway deepened in the grass, outlining what would be confirmed this month as the sunken graves of the slaves who lived and died on a cotton plantation near the Florida Capitol.
The discovery of 40 graves — with perhaps dozens more yet to be found — has spawned discussion about how to honor those buried at the golf course. And it has brought renewed attention to the many thousands of unmarked and forgotten slave cemeteries across the Deep South that could be lost forever to development or indifference.
A Florida state task force estimated two decades ago that there could be as many as 1,500 unmarked and abandoned slave or African American cemeteries across the state. Some Florida lawmakers want to establish a task force to address the matter.
“When I stand here on a cemetery for slaves, it makes me thoughtful and pensive,“said Delaitre Hollinger, the immediate past president of the Tallahassee branch of the NAACP. His ancestors worked the fields of Leon County as slaves.
“They deserve much better than this,“said Hollinger, 26, who is leading a push to memorialize the rediscovered burial ground. “And they deserved much better than what occurred in that era.”
Wooden markers that had identified the graves have long since decayed. For years, golfers have unknowingly trod through the cemetery.
Leon County was the center of Florida’s plantation economy during the antebellum days and had the state’s highest concentration of slaves. Just before the Civil War, 3 of every 4 county inhabitants were human chattel owned by white families.
The Houstouns of Tallahassee was one such family. From the early 1800s through the Civil War, the family operated a 500acre plantation. In modern times it has been parceled out to developers who transformed fields into strip malls and residential neighborhoods, some sprouting stately homes.
A huge swath of the property became the Capital City Country Club, now an 18hole golf course in one of Tallahassee’s most soughtafter communities.