In Touch With Indifference
Even in death, Black bodies did not matter as ‘progress’ outweighed respect
By Betty Miller Buttram
Of Fort Wayne Ink Spot
The letter was delivered to one of my elder relative’s mailbox one day in 1959. My mother received a phone call, and with me in toll, made haste to the elder’s home. My younger self did not know of the significance of this swift movement into the disruption of my time, but upon arrival, faces and body languages of the relatives present told me that something distressful had occurred and they were in deep sorrow.
In March of 2021, I received a phone call from one of my brothers informing me of a news article in the Washington Post about the discovery of discarded gravestones. He mailed me a copy of the article.
The 1959 letter was from the Columbian Harmony Cemetery in Washington, D.C. informing the family that the private cemetery had been sold to a developer and all remains would be exhumed and reburied at the National Harmony Memorial Park in Landover, Maryland. That is just across the Maryland/District line. I learned a few years later, after the receipt of that letter, that the remains of my maternal great-grandparents, my maternal grandmother, and my paternal great-grandfather had been buried in that cemetery. The discarded gravestones reported in the Washington Post article had been discovered in 2016 on the shore banks of a former plantation off the Potomac River in King George County, Virginia, and traced back to the Columbian Harmony Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
What caused those gravestones to be on the shore banks of a former plantation in Virginia?
Before the Columbian Harmony Cemetery came into existence, it was first formed as the Columbian Harmony Society by free African Americans on November 25, 1825 to aid other Black people in the city of Washington, D.C. On April 7, 1828, the Society established the Harmoneon Cemetery that was exclusively for members of the society.
It began with 1.3 acres of land and burials began in 1829. The cemetery quickly filled, and the society was forced to find new burial grounds. It sold the Harmoneon Cemetery for $4,000 and on July 1, 1857 purchased a 17 acres tract bounded by Rhode Island Avenue NE, Brentwood Road NE, T Street NE, and the railroad tracks of the Capital Subdivision of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The graves at the Harmoneon Cemetery were transferred to the new site at Rhode Island Avenue NE and that transfer was completed in 1859.
The cemetery continued to grow and, again, new burial grounds were required. In the summer of 1886, the society purchased another 18 acres tract adjacent to it and the total burial site became known as the Columbian Harmony Cemetery.
From the early 1880s to the 1920s, the cemetery was the most active Black cemetery in Washington, D.C. with 21.8 percent of all African Americans burials occurring there. By 1895, one-third of Washington’s Blacks were buried there. A chapel was built in 1889. By 1900, landscaping and roads were added throughout the cemetery. A caretaker’s lodge was built in 1912. The cemetery was filling so rapidly again that in 1929, the society purchased 44.74 acres of land near Landover, Maryland for $18,000 and it was called the National Harmony Memorial Park. In 1950, the society stopped new burials at Columbian Harmony Cemetery. The lack of new burials left the cemetery in a difficult financial situation.
In 1957 a real estate investor offered to buy Columbian Harmony Cemetery and to pay for relocation costs of the graves to the National Harmony Memory Park in exchange for the property in D.C. and that is where things got a little troubling. It was not only this one real estate developer but a few more and in 1959, Columbian Harmony Cemetery sold the property to a real estate company for commercial development.
The District of Columbia Department of Health drafted and won approval of a whole set of regulations to govern the mass relocation. A D.C. district court agreed to issue a single exhumation order, rather than review thousands of cases. There were 37,000 graves at the cemetery and to move all those graves between May and November 1960 meant that hundreds had to be move every day. There was no time to put the remains in new coffins.
The relocation agreement did not cover the existing memorials and monuments which would have required identifying remains, moving the markers and burying each body with its corresponding marker and headstone. That would have taken too much time and so indifference to respectability and humanity occurred. The attitude of the developers was to get the remains out of Columbian Harmony Cemetery to National Harmony Memorial Park for reburial so that this new real estate development could start.
Approximately 37, 000 graves were reburied in a mass grave at National Harmony Memorial Park. Grave markers were sold as scrap as well as some of the headstones. However, most of the headstones were trucked off and dumped in the Potomac River. Those headstones that were addressed in the Washington Post article had been used to secure the riverbank of the Stuart Plantation on a 1,400-acre conservation easement site on the banks of the Potomac in King George County, Virginia. To refresh your history, Dr. Richard Henry Stuart was the doctor who refused to treat John Wilkes Booth wounded ankle as he tried to escape after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Yes, that Stuart family.
What was the commercial development? A subway station. When the Rhode Island Avenue/Brentwood Metro station was constructed in 1976, workers discovered more bodies, five coffins were unearthed and numerous bones. In 1979 while the station parking lot was being renovated, more bones and bits of cloth and coffins were unearthed. And now, gravestones have shown up on the banks of the Potomac River.
I do not know if any of my grandparents had headstones or markers. That’s something that I did not hear about when that 1959 letter arrived at my great Aunt and Uncle’s house. I knew that they had lived because they were talked about; and if any of my relatives visited their grave sites, they did not take my brothers, my cousins or me with them.
Between the deliverance of that 1959 letter and the Washington Post article in March 2021, my older self has taken on the role of family historian. At our last family reunion three years ago, I shared with the family members copies of two printed pages from the Columbian Harmony Cemetery records. In researching our family history, I found these pages at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in Washington, D.C. The copies contained my maternal great grandmother’s cemetery plot number as well as the plot number for my maternal grandmother-- Mamie Wright, and her daughter, Anna Mae Elizabeth Wright Hamilton.
After reading that article, I realized why my brother mailed it to me. Our grandmothers have been found, and it is time now to search again for our grandfathers. We do not need the markers or the gravestones. In addition to the plot numbers, there is information in those record books that contain dates of death, cause of death, funeral home, and church affiliation. This information will be enough for a memorial with their names on it to be placed by the mass grave site at the National Harmony Memorial Park.
“The bodies of the dead must be treated with respect and charity, in faith and hope of the Resurrection,” the catechism of the Catholic Church teaches. “The burial of the dead is a corporal act of mercy; it honors the children of God, who are temples of the Holy Spirit.”