It’s safe to say this school has some skeletons in its closet.
A Florida high school became a portal to our racist past after 145 unmarked graves, containing the remains of mostly African Americans, were discovered on school property. The gravesites reportedly belonged to Ridgewood Cemetery, a forgotten paupers’ burial ground dating back to the 1940s.
Officials at Tampa’s Clarence Leon King High School were alerted to the possible location of the site by a local resident, reports TV station WYFF. After two weeks of ground-penetrating radar scanning, technicians confirmed the location of the caskets, which were buried 3 to 5 feet underground near one of the school’s agricultural buildings.
And while scanners “couldn’t tell exactly what was under the surface,” according to school officials, “the pattern of findings” pointed to the one-acre cemetery.
Historical records show that the graveyard housed the remains of more than 250 individuals, primarily African Americans. Up to 77 of the interred were children.
Hillsborough School Board chairwoman Tamara Shamburger, who is black, said they were put there on purpose. “Certainly, back in that day, profits were put over people, especially people who look like me,” said Shamburger.
Ridgewood Cemetery only operated from 1942 to 1954; a private company bought the site in 1957, and the school district subsequently purchased it in 1959, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
The cemetery was largely forgotten, but this latest discovery has ripped open old wounds.
“I am sick of this,” said Yvette Lewis, president of the Hillsborough branch of the NAACP. She added that it “hurts … [that] we can be thrown away and nobody tells our history.”
The area has since been cordoned off and slated for review by archaeologists and medical examiners. They will decide whether to seize the land or leave it in the hands of the school district.
Ridgewood isn’t the first indigent gravesite to be unearthed recently in Florida. Three months ago, a radar scan of a Tampa Housing Authority complex uncovered more than 120 coffins belonging to Zion Cemetery, the city’s first segregation-era burial ground for African Americans.
