{"id":344221,"date":"2026-06-20T19:22:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-20T19:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/344221\/"},"modified":"2026-06-20T19:22:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T19:22:07","slug":"volunteers-community-members-preserve-historical-black-cemetery-in-north-texas-on-juneteenth-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/344221\/","title":{"rendered":"Volunteers, community members preserve historical Black cemetery in North Texas on Juneteenth weekend"},"content":{"rendered":"

Volunteers worked Saturday to reclaim more than a century of forgotten Black history this Juneteenth<\/a> weekend as part of an initiative called “Digging for Dignity.”<\/p>\n

The preservation effort is at a historic Tarrant County<\/a> cemetery, which tells the final stories of former slaves, pioneers, military veterans, teachers, preachers, and business owners.<\/p>\n

Music filled volunteers’ ears before they began work on the sacred grounds of the historic Fretwell-New Trinity Cemetery at People’s Memorial Burial Park in Haltom City<\/a>. The cemetery is almost 140 years old and is the final resting place for more than 7,700 people.<\/p>\n

Dr. Spencer Smith, with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, co-organized the event. He said almost 200 volunteers from all walks of life marked headstones that are unreadable and looked for graves to be geolocated on findagrave.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“I think it’s pretty huge. This cemetery, due to a lot of issues, including the legal title to the land, became really neglected for several decades, and it became very overgrown with brush. You couldn’t just walk through and look for cemeteries. Plus, the plot map wasn’t readily available,” Smith said.<\/p>\n

Organizers divided the cemetery into 29 sectors, and volunteers checked every single headstone that was still intact. Only about 30% of the headstones are legible. Others have sunk below the ground.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Volunteers work to document Black history at Haltom City cemetery<\/p>\n

03:53<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The cemetery has never been completely surveyed. Ruth “Cookie” Baker told CBS News Texas<\/a> that she has dozens of family members buried there.<\/p>\n

“It’s not only Black history, it’s the history of our country that we revere, those who worked, but those who came before us, that their contribution is not lost,” Baker said. “It is not lost on us how much time and energy they put into this country being so great.”<\/p>\n

New Mount Rose Baptist Church will hold a day of service each month here at the cemetery. You can get in touch with the church if you’re interested in volunteering.<\/p>\n

In:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Volunteers worked Saturday to reclaim more than a century of forgotten Black history this Juneteenth weekend as part…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":344222,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[15383,7218,122,27,29,28],"class_list":["post-344221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-haltom-city","tag-juneteenth","tag-tarrant-county","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344221\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/344222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}