TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) \u2014 A dark history long buried under the towering live oak trees and manicured lawns of a country club in Florida\u2019s capital city of Tallahassee is reviving painful memories of the community\u2019s segregated past and fueling some residents\u2019 calls for a public reckoning.<\/p>\n
Under the rolling hills of the Capital City Country Club in one of Tallahassee\u2019s most sought-after neighborhoods, the evidence of Florida\u2019s slave-holding past lies just beneath the surface, in the form of the long-lost burial grounds of enslaved people who lived and died on the plantation that once sprawled with cotton there.<\/p>\n
Across the country, many thousands of unmarked and forgotten cemeteries<\/a> of enslaved people<\/a> are at risk<\/a> of being lost, as descendants and volunteers fight development and indifference. <\/p>\n Less than a mile from Florida\u2019s state Capitol, archaeologists with the National Park Service have identified what they believe to be 23 unmarked graves and 14 possible graves near the 7th hole of the golf course, which is semiprivate and currently operates on city-owned land.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know they were enslaved. But who were they?\u201d said Tifany Hill, a Tallahassee resident whose family maintains a historic Black cemetery that dates to the 1800s. <\/p>\n More than four years after the Tallahassee City Commission approved plans to create a commemorative site to preserve and protect the unmarked graves at the golf course, no such memorial has been built. Now, city officials are considering selling the land to the country club, which has paid a nominal $1 a year in rent for nearly 70 years.<\/p>\n That lease has been in place since 1956, when the club reverted to private ownership, allowing it to sidestep a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that banned the segregation of public parks and recreational facilities. Among the club\u2019s former members was a judge whose nomination to the nation\u2019s highest court failed after he faced questions about whether he helped privatize the club to avoid integration.<\/p>\n After receiving a recent offer from the country club, the city had proposed selling the 178-acre (72-hectare) golf course for $1.25 million to the club \u2014 with the legal requirement that it perpetually operate the property as an 18-hole golf course and that the city be allowed to build and maintain a commemorative site for the graves, with public access guaranteed.<\/p>\n After residents opposed to the sale crowded the City Hall chambers on Wednesday, the commission voted to postpone the issue until its next meeting. <\/p>\n Prospect of sale angers activists<\/p>\n The prospect of selling the land that includes the burial grounds is an outrage to Delaitre Hollinger, a local activist whose ancestors were enslaved in Leon County, where on the eve of the Civil War, three out of every four residents were human chattel owned by elite white families. Hollinger helped lead the push to memorialize the rediscovered graves.<\/p>\n \u201cThey were sold on the auction blocks of Leon County, and now we are willing to sell them again,\u201d Hollinger said at Wednesday\u2019s commission meeting.<\/p>\n In Leon County, there are only a handful of known slave burial sites \u2014 despite the scores of plantations that once dominated the area, which was the epicenter of Florida\u2019s slavery economy.<\/p>\n Now residents and some commissioners are questioning why it has taken city staff years to act on plans to commemorate the site.<\/p>\n City administrators have attributed the delay to negotiations around enacting the agreement, as well as damaging tornadoes that hit the area in 2024.<\/p>\n Calls to identify those interred at the site<\/p>\n Kathleen Powers Conti, a Florida State University history professor who specializes in the preservation of sites of trauma and contested history, decried the proposal and urged the city to proactively work to identify those interred at the site. <\/p>\n \u201cI am frankly shocked that in all of these conversations, no one in the country club, no one in the city commission is actually looking to find the descendants of those people buried there,\u201d she said at Wednesday\u2019s meeting.<\/p>\n For Hill and other advocates, the people whose final resting place is now another Florida golf course have been denied dignity for too long \u2014 in life as well as in death.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s our history,\u201d Hill told the commission. \u201cIt could be my ancestor that\u2019s in there.\u201d<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n