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Historical marker honors Zion Cemetery
Evan Axelbank reports.
TAMPA - The history of Mt. Zion Cemetery is finally cast in iron.
The City of Tampa unveiled a plaque Wednesday at the site of the African American burial ground, which was covered over by a segregated housing project called Robles Park.
The Mt. Zion Black cemetery finally has a permanent memorial.
"Some of (those buried here) are smiling," said Fred Hearns, the curator of Black history at the Tampa Bay History Center. "I think some of them are crying. I think their souls are with us today."
The backstory:
Starting in 1920, when the burials ended at one of Tampa's only Black cemeteries, their government did everything possible to make sure no one knew they were there.
As the new plaque notes, when the land was sold, the gravestones were removed.
The land was used as a chicken farm.
By 1951, construction began to build housing for white people.
Geraldine Williams' ancestor was born a slave in 1839, and is still buried on the site.
"Her grave has been desecrated for about a hundred years," said Williams. "Anna was a cook. She was a wife, a mother of 11 children."
As the plaque notes, there are still 400 coffins underneath the Robles Park project, which were found with ground-penetrating radar in 2019 and 2020.
The Mt. Zion Black cemetery finally has a permanent memorial.
The plaque calls for those interred on the site to "finally rest in peace."
"I hope that people would know that the lives that were buried here mattered," said State Rep. Fentrice Driskell (D-Tampa). "I hope that they would know that it's never too late to try to correct a wrong. And I hope they would pass on that information to future generations."
What's next:
Death certificates have been found, and the effort to find their descendants is well under way.
A permanent acknowledgment of Tampa's racist past doesn't heal all wounds, but it is a sign of progress.
"I've heard so many stories from former residents of this community that sometimes, just walking through Robles Park, they could feel some type of spirit," said Hearns. "They could feel something. They couldn't put their finger on it."
The organizers of the memorial here are hoping to get more public funding from the state and Federal government to create a memorial park on the site.
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The Source: Information for this story was gathered by FOX 13's Evan Axelbank.
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