An empty Budweiser can was propped between the bottom edge of Walter “Furry” Lewis’ tombstone and bunches of tall, prickly sow-thistles that had begun to flower.
Local lore has it that musicians and music lovers pilgrimage to this plot at historic Hollywood Cemetery to sip a little, then pour an honoring libation on soil that received the iconic bluesman’s remains after he died in 1981 at the age of 88.
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Lewis’ tombstone is etched with a guitar, its neck partly obscured one day in April by even more out-of-control vegetation. Inscribed beside the illustration is the lyric “When I lay my burden down,” the through line of a Negro spiritual that the famous guitarist and composer recorded in 1969 and, in the years afterward, sang to entertain and explain his style to audiences.
The grave marker for Lewis was visible that day, but the grass, weeds, shrubs and shrubs that had morphed into trees made it impossible to determine exactly how many other tombstones are intact at Hollywood, let alone whose names they bear. Ants scurried in and out of a massive anthill they’d built on one toppled headstone. Castoff tires, a sofa, an oil tank from a residential heating system and piles of stuffed-to-bursting garbage bags were strewn about.
Amid the City of Memphis’ unmet promise, made two years ago, to help prune and preserve Hollywood, Memphians who’ve had an eye on abandoned Black burial grounds are asking how the government and Black communities can better share responsibility for their rescue and upkeep.
Memphians also have asked what essential facts about a community’s life, culture, ritual, poverty and wealth disappear from memory and the public record when tombstones are out of sight or bulldozed into oblivion, as roughly a third of those at Zion, said to be Memphis’ oldest Black cemetery, were several decades ago. What can present-day Memphis glean about itself from historic tombstones and burial records detailing everything from how people earned a living to which diseases claimed their lives?
“Memphis is what I call a real, authentic crossroads of Black history and culture,” said University of Memphis historian Earnestine Jenkins of her fairly young hometown, incorporated in 1819.
“You had urban slaves here, so there were always Blacks here,” continued Jenkins, who’s clocked 20 years of research and trying to find her relatives at Zion, which holds the graves of the three Black founders of Peoples Grocery Co., 1892 lynching victims.
“And where we are on the Mississippi River puts us almost at the exact center of the United States. So, we’re just a real physical, psychological, cultural crossroads when it comes to Black people and these stories of who’s in cemeteries, which run the gamut from the elite to the middle class to the poor.”
Missing tombstones and stolen marble
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990, the 15-acre Zion Cemetery on South Parkway was founded in 1876 and received its last body in 1920 when it reached capacity. Its 30,000 interred individuals represented the bulk of Black Memphians born during the 19th century and continuing, Jenkins said, African rituals that survived centuries of Black enslavement.
She noted the brief biography of the homeless thief whose neighbors shouldered the cost of his interment at Zion, tucking into his pauper’s casket trinkets he had pilfered.
He’d frozen to death while living on the streets.
“They buried him with some of what he’d stolen. But by burying him, they showed him that respect,” Jenkins said.
Before the Christian Methodist Episcopal denomination and, ultimately, the nonprofit Zion Community Project in the 1980s, began returning Zion to what The Commercial Appeal had called a picnic-worthy place with a brook running through it, Zion suffered the same overgrowth and decay Hollywood confronts.
By the 1930s, Black ministers started asking their congregants and those with kin in Zion’s graves to help pay to keep up the facility. The Sons and Daughters of Zion auxiliary of Beale Street Baptist Church had established Zion, which later was deeded to the Christian Methodist Episcopal denomination. By the 1960s, it was an abandoned mess.
At Hollywood Cemetery, in 2019, newly returned Memphis native Anne Edgar set out for the spot where Merna Gray had been laid to rest. “Merna raised my mother,” said Edgar, who is white, of Gray, a Black domestic who lived for 57 years in a cottage behind Edgar’s childhood home.
“She had her own burial insurance. I came out here with Mama, and we stood at Merna’s grave,” said Edgar, a publicist. “When I came back from New York, I thought I’d walk around and find it.”
Her effort was futile. Even after several visits to Hollywood, Edgar hasn’t found Gray’s grave. She wonders if Gray’s tombstone was vandalized or stolen.
Across the country, for years, stolen marble, bronze and other precious materials used to memorialize the dead have wound up on sale, illegally, in antique shops and elsewhere on a bootleg market.
Hollywood, which opened in 1909 as the city’s second known Blacks-only cemetery, is also the final resting place of, among others, those who broke racial barriers in the U.S. military and Tennessee’s colleges and universities, and of sanitation workers who marched alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the famed 1968 Memphis garbage strike.
Among the items glaringly missing at Hollywood are the oversized blocked letters, made of cement and landscaped into the lawn, that had spelled out the cemetery’s name and the red brick posts attached to wrought iron fencing that show in old photos of the facility on Hernando Road, about a block from Interstate 69. A sunshine-yellow cemetery building with a red awning over the front door, also depicted in those photos, is shrouded in vines and more of those weeds that become trees, far taller than they are wide.
The burial ground and abutting Mount Carmel Cemetery, which received its first body in 1911 and is better kept than Hollywood, are striking contrasts to facilities adjacent or around the corner and down a few blocks. At expansive Temple Israel Cemetery, Forest Hill Memorial Park and Calvary Cemetery, the fencing is mostly intact, grass is kept cut and greenery is manicured to give clear views of obelisks, winged angels on pedestals and other monuments.
Threatened Black cemeteries nationwide are increasingly in the spotlight: The Richmond City Council in Virginia voted unanimously last February to assume ownership of three Black cemeteries from a nonprofit that had gone belly up. The State of Florida set a November 2023 deadline for applicants for funding from its Historic Cemeteries Program, which state lawmakers created. Washington lawmakers approved the African-Americans Burial Grounds Preservation Act of 2023.
As of today, Congress has not passed an October 2023 bipartisan bill to fund a National Park Service-led endeavor.
Neglected and underfunded
The answers to why Hollywood and many other Black burial grounds nationwide are in such poor condition depend on who you ask. Some say the disrepair has resulted from a lack of leadership from the get-go. Others say it stems from the corruption of businesspeople who bought cemeteries — by whatever means — to turn a profit. And some link the disrepair to insufficient governmental oversight.
“The state didn’t do much to regulate Black cemeteries because the state didn’t care about Black cemeteries.” That’s the assessment of Earnest Hillman who, with his wife, Margaret Hillman, co-founded Honest Monuments, a grave-marker manufacturer that’s been next door to Hollywood since the company launched in 1989.
“This is 20th Century Jim Crowism,” Anne Edgar said. “Protecting this should be in the civic realm.”
“Some of this problem is systemic,” said Teresa Hill Mays, president of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society of Memphis and the Mid-South. “The response to Black people and Black cemeteries is not the same as with [mainly white] Memorial Park … But we ourselves have neglected our duty and allowed places like Hollywood to fall into disrepair.”
Tennessee law requires commercial cemeteries to establish an endowment for cemetery upkeep. But those laws don’t apply to Tennessee churches that established a disproportionate number of the state’s cemeteries, mainly in the late 1800s and early 1900s, said Jimmy Rout III, Shelby County’s official historian.
When he was appointed five years ago, Rout said, “Immediately, the calls I was getting were about neglected cemeteries and probably 99.8% of them were African-American neglected cemeteries.”
“Over the years,” he added, “if a church from the 1890s, 1910s died out, they could move further out east and leave their cemetery property and just quit taking care of it, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
And while church-established Hollywood and Rose Hill, another dilapidated, historic Black cemetery in Memphis, each have a trust fund of $360,000, Rout said, state law allows only $12,000, or 4% of the fund’s dividends, to be used for annual upkeep. Then, the banks that maintain those trust funds have told him that they are not in the business of mowing lawns.
“Well, you know what? They’re right about that,” Rout said. “However, the cemetery trust is very different than any other kind of trust that you’d have for a child or me or [you] or [your] niece … This is a trust for a property. There are so many walls in the system.”
The actual cost of annual upkeep for each of those cemeteries would hover around $35,000, at a minimum, Rout said. “And that’s just keeping it cut because we have a long growing season … As a business proposition, it’s a bad proposition … As a humanitarian proposition, we have to take responsibility for something that the system did not provide enough money for. That’s my view.”
Because volunteer efforts for cemeteries have come in fits and starts, with each petering out after a few years, it will take a protracted, consistent strategy to shore up things over the long haul. Using his own political and family connections, Rout, whose father had been a mayor of Shelby County, said he plans to ask 10 billionaires in Memphis and elsewhere in the state to donate $2.5 million over two or three years to establish a fund for cemetery restoration. He will ask the state to match those donations.
Those expenditures would make Hollywood, Mount Carmel and Rose Hill visitor-ready for the long term. But even that long-range effort has its limits financially. Perhaps cemetery tours might be created, teaching history and earning dollars to funnel back into cemeteries, especially given their decline, Rout suggested. People are choosing to be cremated at almost twice the rate they’re opting to be buried, which likely poses a whole other threat, he added.
Those burial grounds are important landmarks, filled with meaningful stories, the University of Memphis’ Jenkins reiterated. “There are African things that people are passing on that they don’t know they’re passing on. One of the practices — and not just of Africans because this is pretty universal — is that people bury important objects with the dead,” she said.
Old newspaper articles in Memphis sarcastically derided the practices of, say, burying a thimble with a seamstress’ body or placing children’s toys on top of their graves. The sarcasm was ignorance, Jenkins said.
Consider trees with bottles adorning their branches, a fixture in rural and some urban, Southern landscapes. They mirror bottles, jars and water-filled vases historically found atop graves that anthropologists and archaeologists purposely descend upon, excavating and interrogating the wealth of information they contain. The graves are part of a continuum.
“In a lot of African cultures, there’s a belief that your spirit crosses over a body of water to get over to the next side, to the other world,” Jenkins said “At Pole Bearers Cemetery and also Mount Carmel, some of the grave sites are covered with shells and white pebbles. They come from water, and that is spiritual symbolism …
“Some older people, I think, know these things, even if they don’t know these things are derived from Africa. It’s the passing down, doing it because your parents and grandparents did it. The ritual is how you remember.
“There is such depth to all of this.”
Health and criminal justice journalist Katti Gray’s news coverage has appeared on ABC.com, CBS.com, and in Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Reuters, The Washington Post and other publications. She is an assigning editor at the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange.
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