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Fast Money & Foreign Objects
The parks and recreation department of Waco, Texas started taking down the fence separating the white and black parts of the cemetery on June 7, 2016. (Photo: John Williams)
TEXAS, USA 06/08/2016
One Texas town decides it’s time to desegregate the dead
When the strict Jim Crow laws segregated black and white people across the American south, not even the dead were spared. Most cemeteries in the American south were also marked by racial lines. In Greenwood Cemetery, in Waco, Texas, a fence still segregated the cemetery. Until this week, that is.
Even though Waco, Texas has been integrated for decades, Greenwood Cemetery has separate entrances to access the area where black people and white people are buried. A fence that is a quarter mile long divides the thousands of graves along racial lines.
“I suppose they wanted that so the black ghosts wouldn’t go over there and bother the white ghosts,” Annie Randle, who led the association that cared for black side of the cemetery, told the local paper, the Waco Tribune-Herald, in March 1971.
“We are far from the only city with a segregated cemetery”
John Williams Texas
John Williams is the director of the Waco Parks and Recreation Department. He took over the city project to take down the fence and was on site when the removal started yesterday.
On June 7, we took down the fabric of the chain link fence dividing the cemetery. We have to wait to take down the poles to make sure that there are no nearby graves. We’ve been talking about removing this fence since at least the 1970s because it is like a landmark of segregation. When I came on staff, I wanted to do what we set out to do.
The cemetery dates back at least to the American Civil War in the 1860s; both Union and Confederate soldiers are buried there [A local newspaper account said the cemetery dated back to 1875 but confirmed that veterans were buried there]. It was used until at least 2000. The records are a mess but, from what we can see, it was segregated up until that point. In recent years, some of the segregation was de facto. People often buy their plots decades before they actually use them, so those buried recently may have bought the land when it was still segregated. Others wanted to be buried near family members.
We are far from the only city with a segregated cemetery. In my opinion, we just need to move forward. We didn’t want to do a big fanfare and I don’t get emotional about it. I’ve come to accept that failings like this are part of the human condition. These days, Waco is like other communities in America in terms of race relations. Challenges remain, especially in terms of giving equal opportunities to children of all backgrounds. But we need to look how far we’ve come.
Williams told the Waco Tribune-Herald that the Parks and Recreation Department is considering replacing the fence with a walking path to memorialize the divide but to allow full access.
One Texas town decides it’s time to desegregate the dead
