Back in the 1970s, Wanda Brandon says, Washington Park Cemetery was the most beautiful place African-American people were buried in St. Louis. Today, the cemetery is unrecognizable.
Much of the area is grown over with honeysuckle. The small sections – most near the entry to the cemetery – that have been cleared show gravestones turned over and broken. The decay is especially shocking because it is a relatively modern cemetery, with the earliest gravestones dating back only to the 1920s.
A small group of volunteers, including Brandon, have been coming to the cemetery in Berkeley since 2011 to clean it up. “This is all being maintained by me and other people,” Brandon said. “This cemetery has been under no ownership, for real, for 30-some years.”
Even in the cleared sections, many graves are so decayed that the names are illegible. In the uncleared sections, about half of its total acreage, weeds and bushes grow so thick you can’t even walk up to the gravestones to figure out who might be buried there.
For Brandon, the neglect of the cemetery is personal. Her mother is buried here, and she can’t find her grave. So she clears the cemetery – pulling up undergrowth and mowing grass – in hopes to find her mother’s grave someday, all without pay.
“My mother’s buried out there, and I can’t find her grave,” Brandon said. “My grandmother’s buried out there, too, and I can’t find her grave. It’s a jungle where she’s buried at.”
One section of the cemetery is on activists’ minds more than the rest – section 10, right next to Interstate 70, across from St. Louis-Lambert International Airport, which is littered with billboards. In this context, they seem jarring. Wide metal poles like tree trunks stab into the earth two or three feet from weathered headstones.
“See that pillar?” Brandon said, walking through the cemetery. “See how there’s headstones on both sides of that? See, all up in here, people are buried. When I saw this, this really upset me. They have the audacity to desecrate and disrespect the dead.”
A spokesperson for DDI Media, the company that owns the billboards, said in an email that not only are the billboards there with the consent of the cemetery owners, they keep the cemetery running.
“When those billboards were placed on the property in the mid-1980s, it was with the full support and agreement of the cemetery owners and operators,” said Vince Miller, the president of DDI Media. “Their existence has contributed to the cemetery’s ongoing operation for many years – with the full support and agreement of the cemetery owners and operators.”
Kevin Bailey with Amazing Grace Enterprises, the current cemetery owner, did not respond to a request for comment.
Brandon, a long-time Ferguson activist, sees this disrespect as another example of St. Louis’ consistent failure to value black life, even after death.
Though she had visited the cemetery to honor her mother before, Brandon didn’t start to come to Washington Park as a volunteer until her anger and sorrow over police violence drove her to take her activism from the streets to the cemetery. It’s another location where the sacredness of black lives – in this case, after death – is being disrespected for profit.
“I started coming out here the week that Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were killed,” she said. “I was so upset. I cried, cried, cried.”
She began her work at Washington Park then and has been coming to the cemetery regularly ever since – and attempting to contact both DDI Media and the companies that are advertising in the cemetery, asking them to remove their advertisements.
“I was told that they would definitely not move their signs out of the cemetery,” she said.
This isn’t the first time part of the cemetery has been bought up by a company. Interstate 70 was routed through the area in the late 1950s. Then, in 1996 the land on the north side of the interstate was claimed for an airport expansion by eminent domain, and everyone buried there was disinterred. Their bodies were moved to several other cemeteries in the area.
The billboards have carried advertisements by groups like SSM Health, Bunny Bread, the Archdiocese of St. Louis, Goldblatt-Singer Law Firm, Clarkson Jewelers, and Steinberg Skating Rink, among others. Brandon, and the rest of her group – the Washington Park Cemetery Anti-Desecration League – intend to send a letter to each of these companies, informing them that billboards displayed in a burial ground are disrespectful.
“We all know, if this were any other race of people, these actions would have never occurred,” Brandon writes in the letter she plans to send to each company that has advertised in the cemetery. “Do not ignore the cries of a segment of the human population that has been dismissed, disenfranchised, suffered redlining, and other inequalities.”
