I like cemeteries

I like old cemeteries. There is a joke in our family that I liked cemeteries so much that I named my youngest daughter after one.

I find them to be very interesting, the massive stones, etched with not only important dates but with information that either the person who died or the ones left behind deem so important it has to be on a tombstone.

This is a perfect example. This stone is in Pinewood Cemetery in Charlotte, NC. Pinewood was the black cemetery until the 1970s or so. I am sure the R.M. Miller, Jr. thought he was honoring George Miller by placing the stone. But why put that George Miller was a slave and servant to R. M. Miller? And why put his own name on the stone? After 84 years who is really being remembered? A search of the burial records of Pinewood Cemetery doesn't even list a George Miller as being buried there.



While researching Elmwood/Pinewood Cemetery in Charlotte I came across this insert:
http://www.cmhpf.org/Surveys&relmwood.htm

Segregation and the Mark of Jim Crow In Elmwood Cemetery
Elmwood Cemetery’s landscape design also tells the story of racial divisions within Charlotte-Mecklenburg, divisions that were strictly upheld throughout the South until the middle of the twentieth century.

The Elmwood Cemetery complex was, from its inception, a combination of three distinctly separate burial grounds: Elmwood Cemetery, containing plots available for sale only to white citizens; Pinewood Cemetery, with plots available only to paying African Americans; and Potter’s Field, a plot of land owned by the city and used exclusively for the burial of white citizens who could not afford to purchase a plot.

While Potter’s Field was placed on the edge but still within the boundaries of all-white Elmwood, Pinewood Cemetery was designed as a completely separate burial ground. No roads connected Elmwood and Pinewood, and Pinewood could not be accessed by the main entrance to Elmwood on Sixth Street – African Americans used an entrance on Ninth Street to enter Pinewood, which had no paved streets and no peripheral fencing until the middle of the twentieth century.

The system of strict racial segregation set up under the Jim Crow laws of the early decades of the twentieth century dictated not only where African Americans could work, eat, shop, and socialize, but also where they could bury their dead. To emphasize the boundaries between the already segregated Elmwood and Pinewood cemeteries, a fence was erected in the 1930s between the two burial grounds. At one point, a “No Trespassing” sign was added to the fence, its warning addressing visitors to Elmwood.

Years after the city of Charlotte voted against discrimination in the sale of cemetery plots, the fence between Elmwood and Pinewood continued to stand as a symbol of racial discrimination.

Finally, in the late 1960s, empowered by the successes of the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, black Charlotteans began a crusade to bring the fence down. Leading the fight was Fred Alexander, Charlotte’s first black city councilman and the political voice of African Americans in Charlotte.

During the spring, summer and fall of 1968, Alexander argued the case for voluntary removal of the fence, fighting a white majority opposition within the City Council until January of 1969, when “Mayor Stan R. Brookshire broke a three-to-three tie in the Council.”

The next day, the fence was removed by the Mecklenburg Jaycees, an African American boys organization whose members had volunteered repeatedly before the City Council to remove the fence.

“This fence,” Alexander told Charlotte News reporters as he watched the fence come down, “has always been an insult to Negroes. It didn’t mean anything to white folks, but when I was a little boy, I used to come here and see this and to me it was just the worst thing in the world.”