Descendants want to memorialize the site.īrian Palmer The East End Cemetery, pictured on March 2020, was founded in 1897 in Richmond, VA. Local officials want to sell the property to a commercial developer. Today, the Black cemetery is the center of a legal fight between the descendant community of River Road and the HOC. "It's the lost colony." An upscale supermarket is now where Matthews' family home once stood. "It bothers me to think about what happened to the River Road community," he says. Matthews gets emotional talking about the past. "It was a prosperous, vibrant community," says Matthews, describing the Black enclave where he was born in 1944. In the 1700's there were several plantations along River Road, and after emancipation, a community of Black people flourished for almost a century – they built homes, a school, ballfields, a church and a cemetery. It's owned by Montgomery County's Housing Opportunities Commission (HOC), the county's housing agency. Developers bulldozed it in the late 1950's to give way to a high-rise tower and a parking lot. Originally, the cemetery was called White's Tabernacle 39. As a kid Harvey Matthews cut through the Moses Macedonia African Cemetery on River Road in Bethesda, Md., on his way to school, and remembers playing hide-and-seek there.
0 kommentar(er)
