Progress to restore Cincinnati’s historical Black cemeteries
WVXU radio host Lucy May invited Holly McGee, a professor of Africana Studies, and Jenny Wohlfarth, a professor of journalism, to "Cincinnati Edition" to speak on the historic and cultural significance of two local Black cemeteries that are undergoing preservation efforts — backed by federal funding.
One of them, the Union Baptist Cemetery, founded in 1864, is a 16-acre site in Price Hill. It’s the oldest Black cemetery in Hamilton County still in its original location. The other, the United Colored American Cemetery, sits on a hilly 11.5-acre site in Madisonville and was founded in 1848. It was originally located in Avondale but was moved to its current location in 1883–1884 when a group of white neighborhood citizens considered it a nuisance and demanded that it be moved somewhere else. Union Baptist Church took ownership in 1968.
“For Black Americans I cannot understate the importance of genealogical history,” McGee stressed on the show.
McGee was the co-author of a $750,000 National Parks Service grant recently awarded to Union Baptist church.
The grant, she said, will go toward essentials such as securing and maintaining the property, repairing monuments, and digitalizing death records.
Those death records, as Wohlfarth describes in an August 2024 article for Cincinnati Magazine, are all handwritten in script and are filled with the untold stories of Cincinnati’s most important people such as abolitionists, suffragists and underground railroad conductors.
Featured image at top iStock Photo/Nickbeer
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