Woman doesn’t want rediscovered graves moved

For Betty Bowden, thoughts of moving her family’s Clayton County cemetery are as painful as memories of when her great-grandfather’s church was set on fire.

The 72-year-old Atlanta woman argues a proposal to dig up her ancestors’ remains and bury them in another graveyard about a mile away is motivated by racism and greed.

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Andria Simmons/asimmons@ajc.com

Betty Bowden, 72, says the Clayton County Commission will disgrace her relatives if it votes to move an African-American cemetery, now near a Hartsfield-Jackson airport runway, to make room for a landfill. Her great-grandfather started the cemetery.

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Jessica McGowan/jmcgowan@ajc.com

Betty Bowden looks over old photos of her relatives in her southwest Atlanta home.

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“It’s painful that you really don’t know where your family is,” Bowden said. “When I went last week, I was devastated when I saw they made the graves so you can’t get to it.”

However, another descendant and a College Park business say relocating the old Union Bethel AME Church Cemetery is the only way Bowden and others will be able to visit their ancestors’ graves.

The historic, 311-grave African-American cemetery sits on private property in the shadow of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport’s fifth runway in northern Clayton County. It is surrounded by a quarry and dump filled with construction debris, making the graveyard inaccessible. Mounds of dirt circle the property and trees have grown over the graves.

Tuesday, the Clayton County Commission will decide whether to issue a permit to College Park recycling company Stephens MDS to relocate the graves to Carver Memorial Gardens in Riverdale. The commission delayed a decision in order to consider comments from the public.

Stephens workers rediscovered the graves while expanding the 200-acre landfill.

“My client spent mega-bucks trying to find the family members, and nobody has been there in 40 years,” Stephens’ attorney and former County Commission Chairman Crandle Bray said Friday. “It’s just not accessible.”

State law allows developers who wish to move graves to apply for a county permit, hire an archaeologist and attempt to find the descendants through a public hearing.

Flossie Bailey, 74, was the only descendant who appeared at the public hearing. She told commissioners she would like the cemetery moved so she could visit the grave of her grandfather, who was one of the last people buried at Union Bethel. He died in 1949.

Bowden said she first heard of plans to move the cemetery from her daughter, who had seen newspaper accounts of the proposal last month. She urged county commissioners to prohibit the move. The Clayton County NAACP also has voiced opposition.

Bowden’s great-grandfather bought the property in the 1800s and built a small church and cemetery. He buried his parents, former slaves, there. She estimates that about 75 of her relatives are buried there.

“I saw my dad and grandfather dig many graves back there,” Bowden said.

But the church is long gone. Only eight headstones stand among the 311 graves that have been identified at the cemetery.

After the Union Bethel church burned for a second time in the 1960s, Bowden and her family began attending services at a church nearby in Forest Park. Her family stopped caring for the graves.

“We were afraid to go out there and do anything,” Bowden said.

She moved to Atlanta, and the rest of her family began moving out of Clayton County. They buried relatives in other cemeteries and forgot about the Union Bethel property, Bowden said. That was before they heard the graves would be moved, she said.

Jeff Gardner, an archaeologist hired by Stephens, said he has mapped the known graves and will make sure they are marked at the new site. He said the move will allow Bowden and others to access the cemetery.

“It’s dangerous to go out there now,” Gardner said. “These people are entering private property and dodging bulldozers to see what this graveyard looks like. We want them to be able to see their relatives safely.”