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Cemetery for ex-slaves turns 120 years old PDF Print E-mail
Written by DeadGirl   
Friday, 28 April 2006
By LESSIE SCURRY
For the Journal-Constitution
04/13/06

When Winifred Watts Hemphill goes to work every day, she's helping perpetuate an institution her great-grandfather helped start more than a century ago.

Hemphill is president of South-View Cemetery, which Albert Watts and five other former slaves organized in 1886 to ensure that African-Americans had somewhere to bury their relatives with dignity.

Hemphill said. "You find very few black-owned businesses that have survived for so long."
South-View, at 1990 Jonesboro Road, was 35 acres of farmland before it was transformed into a burial place open to all races. It now holds the remains of more than 70,000 African-Americans, many of whom were prominent members of their communities.

The cemetery will observe its 120th anniversary at 2:30 p.m. April 21 with Charter Day, highlighted by the announcement of the newly formed Historic South-View Preservation Foundation.

Among the notables expected to be on hand for the ceremony to honor loved ones buried at South-View are Andrew Young, former U.N. ambassador and former Atlanta mayor; Christine King Farris, sister of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; June Dobbs Butts, daughter of John Wesley Dobbs; and Norris Conley, a relative of Alonzo Herndon. The ceremony will include tributes by family members to people buried there, a "pouring of libations" ceremony, a balloon release in memory of the deceased and a dedication ceremony.

"I grew up in the days of segregation, and that was mostly the only cemetery we went to," said Butts, 77, whose father often was called "the mayor of Auburn Avenue" and was the grandfather of the late former Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson.

"I was awed by the mausoleums, and I wondered, why so much when death itself seemed so simple," Butts said.

Foundation President William W. Allison, whose grandfather William Henry Whitaker was a South-View board member, said the foundation will work mainly to restore and maintain the cemetery's historic section. The foundation, made up of various history-minded people of diverse professions, also will provide educational resources regarding the lives of the people buried there.

"A lot of the children of the people buried here are in their 80s," Hemphill noted. "It's important that we get this information from them. You know, there were 100 years between slavery and the Martin Luther King Jr. movement."

Albert H. Watts, Hemphill's grandfather, started out at South-View as a gravedigger and became its president and treasurer in the late 1970s, serving until his death in 2001. It was around the time of his death that Hemphill, a lawyer with a business and economics background, stepped in as president, working with other members of the Watts family.

Lifetime cemetery associates such as Butts say the strong family element is what has kept South-View so distinctive for so long.

"It's wonderful to see [family] history woven into a business," she said. "It's like a prism. History is just facts. But when you look through it at the people as a part of that history, it's a beautiful thing."

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/atlanta/stories/0413smxsvcemetery.html
 
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