In Savannah, a delayed reckoning over Black burial site under popular square
SAVANNAH — Georgia’s oldest Colonial city has tasked a group of prominent citizens with finally “making right what we did not or could not make right in our past.”
In this case, how to memorialize African Americans who still lie beneath one of this city’s most picturesque public spaces more than 250 years after they began to be buried there.
Recent research by city archivist Luciana Spracher confirmed what local folklore long suspected: Whitefield Square had been part of the city’s “Negro Burial Ground,” the cemetery for both enslaved and free people of color between 1763 and 1844.
As the city grew in the 1850s, the graves were supposed to be relocated to the segregated Laurel Grove Cemetery as Whitefield Square was laid out and the surrounding lots of Wesley Ward were sold for development. But ground-penetrating radar conducted by a nonprofit last December revealed that at least 80 potential burial chambers and two burial clusters remain.
The nine members of the city of Savannah’s Whitefield Square Burial Ground Committee convened for the first time last week after the Savannah City Council tasked it with making recommendations.
Effort to separate fact from fiction
Confirmation of the burial site under Whitefield Square, a popular destination for locals and visitors alike in the Landmark Historic District, took a long, circuitous route.
Spracher’s wider quest to set the historical record straight and identify various burial grounds in the district began six years ago, during the pandemic shutdown, when she was conducting research on the square formerly known as Calhoun (so named after the death of the secessionist and defender of slavery, John C. Calhoun). A tour guide had misinformed his group that Calhoun Square had been built over a slave cemetery. A writer visiting from New York who had been on that tour ended up sparking the local movement that led to the square being renamed in 2024 in honor of Susie King Taylor (a formerly enslaved woman who served as a Union nurse, taught freed Black children and wrote a wartime memoir).
Spracher’s research affirmed Taylor Square sits adjacent to an area that was once known as “Stranger’s Burial Ground,” a cemetery set aside in 1819 that Spracher said was intended for white people who were either poor or not from Savannah and could not be buried in what is now known as Colonial Park Cemetery. “A potter’s field,” Spracher said.
But her deep dive into the city archives uncovered inconsistencies in records and deeds when it came to the different cemeteries, which were all separated by race, class and religion. Dates and maps did not always line up, and that is what turned her attention to the “Negro Burial Ground” in and around Whitefield Square.
The rectangular-shaped Whitefield Square is lined on three sides by colorful gingerbread-fringed Victorian-era row houses and a historic African American church. A lacey white gazebo in its center — built for Burt Reynolds’ 1976 directorial debut, “Gator” — is often host to engagement and prom photos and weddings.
It is also hallowed ground, said storyteller, guide and community activist Patt Gunn, who offered a blessing to the land before the Lamar Institute commenced its radar imaging.
“I am Gullah Geechee,” said Gunn. “We have all kinds of genres … like our folkways, foodways, spirituality, water rights, environmental rights. But the most important of all of them is our burial rights. If you have found bodies in the earth in a public place and they belong to the African American community, those are sacred places, period.”
Now Gunn is among the council-appointed group of educators, preservationists, residents and historians — including Vaughnette Goode-Walker, executive director of the Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum; historian and author Hermina Glass-Hill; and internationally renowned sculptor Jerome Meadows — who will determine the language for the eventual historical marker and other ways to honor the space.
The city, however, will not excavate the square nor exhume the bodies, said Spracher. In an email, she explained that the city will follow the precedent set with Colonial Park Cemetery. “We will leave the square and the burial ground under it intact and respect it as a historical, inactive burial ground with a passive green space over it.”
Emotional moment for alderwoman
Savannah Mayor Pro Tem Estella Shabazz grew visibly emotional during the Feb. 26 City Council meeting when Spracher detailed the radar findings and the council voted to establish the advisory committee.
In a subsequent phone interview, Shabazz explained telling the full story holds deep meaning for her. “I’m just so thankful to be in this position, to make a difference and to help tell the story of our ancestors,” she said, her voice cracking.
Spracher and Gordon Denny, director of the city’s Park and Tree Department, will serve as support staff to the advisory committee, whose members will spend most of May combing through the research. Some of that research will involve studying how other communities, such as Charleston, South Carolina, have memorialized graves in public spaces.
“This is an opportunity for Savannah to actually honor the enslaved who built this city. It is also an opportunity for us to begin to have conversations about what happened to them and who they were,” said Gunn.
In June, advisory committee members will gather again and meet every other week to begin the hard work of reconciliation, repair and healing.
