NEWNAN — There are no headstones, just impressions in the soil where 249 enslaved people are buried.
On Monday, more than 100 years after the last burial at the Farmer Street Cemetery, Ayisat Idris-Hosch led about a dozen people through the graveyard that they are trying to save from disrepair and encroachment.
And she pointed out the periwinkles. “People planted periwinkles to mark the graves,” said Idris-Hosch, the president of Newnan’s African American Alliance.
Credit: Alyssa Pointer
Credit: Alyssa Pointer
Activists have complained that the site, formerly known as Newnan’s “colored cemetery,” is being used as a staging area to dump mountains of dirt and mulch from nearby construction. The city of Newnan is renovating and adding to C. Jay Smith Park.
Just over Idris-Hosch’s shoulder was the gleaming fresh concrete of a new skate park and bowl that workers are putting the finishing touches on. The project also will include new restrooms, a splash pad, a pump track and an adventure playground.
The protesters want the city to clean up the cemetery, put up gravemarkers and re-sod the area that workers destroyed with the dirt piles. They say they also want the graveyard to receive the same attention that the city gives to a Confederate cemetery across town. No one in the mostly Black community where the cemetery is located wanted the skate park, they say, and no one was ever consulted about its construction.
Credit: Alyssa Pointer
Credit: Alyssa Pointer
“It is a development that is being weaponized against a historical, cultural heritage. That is what I fear is happening here since there hasn’t been any engagement,” said Peggy King Jorde, a cultural projects consultant whose brother lives in town. “When you see actions like that, you can’t help but call it all into question.”
Jorde worked on the African Burial Ground project in New York City, where the remains of up to 15,000 enslaved and free Africans were found on a six-acre burial ground during a construction project. Jorde said several community meetings, some at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, were held to get feedback from the community.
Earlier this month, the Rev. Render Godfrey, a local businessman and pastor of Pure Worship Deliverance Tabernacle, discovered the piles of dirt and mulch at the cemetery.
“It made me sick to my stomach,” said Godfrey, who quickly posted two long Facebook Live videos that went viral.
Credit: Alyssa Pointer
Credit: Alyssa Pointer
The city owns the cemetery, as well as the Coweta County African American Museum and Research Center, which is also on the property.
“They would never dream of building a skate park next to predominantly white Oak Hill Cemetery across town,” said Idris-Hosch. It’s “just one more example of Newnan’s double standard and disrespect when it comes to race.”
Cleatus Phillips, the town’s city manager, acknowledged that dirt and mulch have been dumped at the cemetery, but said that he ordered it cleaned up when it was brought to his attention.
Phillips also told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the Newnan followed all of the proper steps in informing the community of the construction, which he said is 99% done.
A city spokesperson released a statement saying, ”Throughout the renovation efforts process for C. Jay Smith Park, the city held public participation events through preliminary concept meetings, stakeholder meetings, community input sessions and surveys. These forms of public participation allowed residents, local business owners and interest groups to share their feedback and input with city officials surrounding the project.”
Sitting on just four acres, it would be easy to overlook the cemetery between Farmer and Cole streets.
Credit: Alyssa Pointer
Credit: Alyssa Pointer
Burials started there in 1828. But, in 1893, the city instituted a ban, saying it was full. That was six years prior to the gruesome lynching of Samuel Hose.
On April 12, 1899, Hose, an itinerant farmer from Macon County, crushed the skull of Alfred Cranford, a white man, during a dispute over money. He then reportedly raped Cranford’s wife, Mattie, before fleeing. He was captured on April 22 and lynched the next day without the benefit of a trial.
Hose was not buried at Farmer Street or Eastview, which replaced it. His body was burned, and he was methodically dismembered, his body parts given out like trophies.
The lynching was so savage that on the day after the Hose lynching, noted scholar W.E.B. DuBois set out from his office at Atlanta University, intent on meeting with Atlanta Constitution editor Joel Chandler Harris.
Credit: Unknown
Credit: Unknown
He carried with him two letters. One was a letter of introduction and the other was a letter protesting the lynching.
But before he arrived at the Constitution office, DuBois learned that Hose’s knuckles were on sale in a grocer’s window in downtown Atlanta.
“One could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved,” DuBois wrote.
Six years later, in DuBois, gathered 32 prominent blacks for a meeting on the Canadian side of the Niagara River to call for full civil liberties, an end to racial discrimination, recognition of human brotherhood and the end of lynching. By 1909, that group, the Niagara Movement, evolved into the NAACP.
Credit: Alyssa Pointer
Credit: Alyssa Pointer
Hose was killed near Oak Hill Cemetery. The immaculate cemetery is where Newnan’s most prominent white citizens are buried, along with Confederate soldiers. On Monday, a Confederate flag fluttered in the muggy air.
Many believe the Farmer Street cemetery was originally 16 acres and has been encroached on over the last century. Just one headstone, relocated inside the museum, survives: “Charlie Burch, Nov. 20, 1869, son of A.B. and Eliza Burch.”
Credit: Alyssa Pointer
Credit: Alyssa Pointer
The city allowed the cemetery to fall into disrepair “because they thought we weren’t gonna care any longer,” Godfrey said. “This is total disrespect for the Black community and our ancestors. You don’t go in and disturb a cemetery.”
At about noon Monday, Idris-Hosch led the protesters from the cemetery to the Coweta County Historic Courthouse, about a mile away, as she chanted “Don’t dump on our ancestors.”
She could barely find her voice when she grabbed the megaphone to speak at the courthouse.
Credit: Alyssa Pointer
Credit: Alyssa Pointer
In 2016, she and her husband moved with their three boys from Washington, D.C. to Newnan to give them a quieter life. In 2017, their 5-year-old son Benjamin “Kamau” Hosch III drowned while attending summer camp at Cochran Mill Nature Center in south Fulton County.
“Him being buried here means we are never leaving,” Idris-Hosch said. “So my legacy is in Newnan, and we need to honor the people who built this city for free.”
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