Kelley Firm - December Newsletter

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CLEARWATER MIGHT ALSO HAVE A LOST AFRICAN AMERICAN CEMETERY KELLEY FIRM NEWSLETTER A large tree stood in the middle of the empty field next to Essie “Let’s find archaeologists who will help,” said 64-year-old Muham- Rayner-Jones’ childhood home in the African American neighbor- mad Abdur-Rahim, who grew up in Clearwater Heights. “I don’t hood of Clearwater Heights. see any reason why we shouldn’t.” And, once a week, she said, Sonny Buchanan sat under it to pay A group of former Clearwater Heights residents have reached respect to his mother. out to the property’s current owner, Frank Crum, Jr., but he does not support their investigation. The former cemetery land is now “She was buried nearby,” said Rayner-Jones, 74. part of a 2-acre vacant lot on his FrankCrum Staffing’s Clearwater campus at 100 S. Missouri Ave. But it was the 1960s. And the 1-acre African American cemetery, on land near the corner of Madison Avenue and Gould Street, had “We have every reason to believe that the funeral directors who been moved during the prior decade. moved the cemetery back in the 1950s did a thoughtful and thorough job,” Crum wrote in an email to the Tampa Bay Times. In “They took the graves with headstones,” said Rayner-Jones, who a statement, Crum said he does not believe there are any bodies grew up on Gould Street. “They left the unmarked ones, and there buried on the site. were plenty. Go thumping around, you’ll find skeletons.” A year ago, Abdur-Rahim admitted, he would have been hesitant Others who grew up in that since-razed neighborhood also say to come forward with the notion that a cemetery has been lost they were told as children that the field remained a burial ground on that land for decades. But today, he said, the Tampa Bay area after the headstones disappeared. recognizes it is possible.Two lost local cemeteries have been discovered in the past year. They are now seeking confirmation that there are active graves there, or whether it was a neighborhood ghost story. First came the 1830s-era Fort Brooke Estuary Cemetery, found 2

during development of the Water Street Tampa project. Then, acting on a report by the Times, archaeologists revealed that the segregation-era all-black Zion Cemetery is under a portion of the Robles Park Village housing projects in Tampa. Now, the mid-20th century Ridgewood Cemetery for paupers is the subject of research underway on the campus of King High School in Hillsborough County. What’s more, historians believe the early-20th century College Hill Cemetery for Cubans and African Americans is on an empty piece of land that is now part of Tampa’s Italian Club Cemetery Still, those lost cemeteries have records pointing to their former locations. There is no paper trail for the old burial ground in Clearwater Heights. It is neither on maps nor listed in city directories. The Times could not find a single obituary citing a cemetery in Clear- water Heights. Those raised there say the cemetery didn’t even have a sign or formal name. “We have our memories,” Abdur-Rahim said. Clearwater Heights was established in the early 1900s and rough- ly bounded by Cleveland Street to the north, Court Street to the south, Ewing Ave. to the west and Missouri Ave. to the east. The cemetery was constructed on soft sand, the former residents no map showing where everyone was buried. If there were no said, and abutted the Williams Elementary School playground markers, how would they know where they were?” without a fence separating the two. Still, news archives detailing the school’s construction in 1946 don’t mention a cemetery. “We are going to keep looking for answers and archives,” said Former cemetery neighbor Rayner-Jones said, “they didn’t even Clearwater Historical Society President Allison Dolan, who is do a good job moving those they moved.” For weeks after the assisting the former residents because she believes active graves graves were exhumed, she said, children found bones scattered could have been left behind. about. Among the questions Dolan has: When was the first burial and “We’d try to guess what part of the body it was,” said Ray- KELLEY FIRM NEWSLETTER how many burials were there? ner-Jones. “We didn’t realize what was going on until we got older.” Robert Young, who as a youth worked as a grave digger, recalls assisting with a burial in Clearwater Heights in the mid-1950s Her recollection mirrors what occurred in Zion Cemetery. Nearly The 75-year-old, who today owns Smith-Youngs Funeral Home 130 coffins were discovered under Zion’s footprint. Archaeolo- in Clearwater, said the cemetery was exhumed not long after and gists expect to find hundreds more. moved to Parklawn Memorial Cemetery in Dunedin. Williams Elementary School closed in 1967, and developments But 64-year-old Ruth Rembert said her grandfather, Jefferson began to replace sections of Clearwater Heights soon after. Rembert, was buried in Clearwater Heights in 1930, yet there is no record of him at Parklawn. Three years ago, Barbara Sorey-Love, 67, founded the Clearwater Heights Reunion Committee that brings former neighborhood “I think he is still in the Heights” said Rembert, who was also residents together. raised there. She thought members would reminisce about the good times Though he was not part of that team that exhumed the Clearwa- they shared. ter Heights burial ground, funeral home owner Young also said active graves could have been left behind. “But everyone kept bringing up the cemetery,” Sorey-Love said. “It is time to begin a discussion to find those buried in the cemetery “Some had markers, but others did not,” Young said. “There was on the Heights and to honor their memories.” 3

RE V. GEORGE CLEMENTS HAS DIED; FAMED HOLY ANGELS PASTOR WAS ADVOCATE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS AND ADOPTION KELLEY FIRM NEWSLETTER Rev. George Clements, a longtime civil rights advocate Clements “was one of the first voices advocating for civil from Chicago’s South Side who was also known as the rights for African Americans within the Catholic Church,” first Catholic priest to adopt a child, and later, three more, Pfleger said. died Monday at a hospital in Northwest Indiana. He was 87. In 1945, Clements became the archdiocese’s first African American graduate of Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Clements suffered a massive stroke Oct. 12 and more Seminary. He was ordained as a priest in 1957 and went recently suffered a heart attack which contributed to his on to become the first black pastor at Holy Angels in 1969. death, his son, Joey, 52, the first of the famed pastor’s four adopted sons. Clements spearheaded the “One Church-One Child” pro- gram in 1980, which aimed to spur Catholic churches to Active in the civil rights movement, Clements marched find adoptive parents for orphaned black children. with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., in Chicago, Alabama and Mississippi and was arrested. Clements started a similar program for people living with drug addiction in 1994 and another for incarcerated people “George Clements is someone who’s an icon in this city. and their families in 1999. He fought for justice, he fought for equality, he fought against racism” fellow South Side priest Rev. Michael “The priesthood is a vocation. But then along the way, one Pfleger of St. Sabina Church. gets avocations, and mine were three: homelessness, ad- dicts and prisoners,” Clements told the Sun-Times in 2017. “He opened his doors to everybody, he’s the one who hid Bobby Rush when he was a Black Panther and police were “I’m really, really proud of what they’ve accomplished,” searching for him,” Pfleger said, recalling how U.S. Rep. Clements said of his sons in 2017. “They haven’t become Bobby Rush, then a Black Panther, sought refuge at Cle- world leaders, but they haven’t been to jail, or on drugs, or ments’ church while on the run following a police raid on anything like that. God is good.” the West Side that left Black Panther leader Fred Hampton dead in 1969. Pfleger said St. Sabina will hold a memorial service for Clements on January 26. 4

Azellia White, a pioneering African American female pilot, is dead at 106 Azellia White, one of the nation’s first African American female husband, Hulon “Pappy” White, to Tuskeegee, Alabama, where he pilots, earned her pilot’s license just after World War II and found would work as an airplane mechanic, according to the Lone Star freedom flying in the skies above the Jim Crow South. Flight Museum in Houston. “She says you just felt free up there, just free. There weren’t any After World War II, White and her husband, along with two other racial barriers or things like that when you’re in the skies,” her Tuskegee Airmen, created the Sky Ranch Flying Service, which great-niece, Emeldia Bailey, told CNN affiliate KTRK. was a flight school, delivery service and airport with a mission to serve the black community during segregation. White died of “natural causes” September 14, Bailey told CNN. She was 106. Her funeral was held September 21, and she was White earned her pilot’s license in 1946 and flew with Tuskegee buried in a cemetery just outside Houston. Airmen who had come home from the war, according to the Lone Star Flight Museum. Though White is regarded as racial pioneer, she flew in the con- trails of other African American women who took to the skies. At family gatherings, White regaled relatives with tales of her aerial adventures. “We would sit and listen to all her stories, about She was born in June 1913 in Gonzales, Texas, about 75 miles places where she’d flown,” Bailey said. east of San Antonio, and would have been a little girl when Amer- ica’s first black female pilot, Bessie Coleman, earned her wings in Though she herself never got a chance to fly her great-aunt, Bailey 1921, according to the National Women’s History Museum. recalled White flying her mother from Tuskegee to Birmingham on shopping trips. But in that time of racial prejudice, Coleman had needed to earn her license from France’s Fédération Aéronautique Internationale In 2018, White was inducted into the Organization of Black before touring America and Europe giving flight lessons. Aerospace Professionals Hall of Fame and Texas Aviation Hall of Fame according to the Lone Star Flight Museum. White married in 1936 and five years later moved with her KELLEY FIRM NEWSLETTER 5

‘AMERICA HAS NO DREAMS FOR BLACK AND BROWN PEOPLE:’ SAMARIA RICE’S CONTINUING JOURNE Y, 5 YE ARS AF TER POLICE KILLED HER SON TAMIR KELLEY FIRM NEWSLETTER In the final lines of a letter penned to her dead son on what couldn’t escape it. Tamir was pronounced dead of his wounds at 12:54 a.m. would have been Tamir Rice’s 17th birthday, Samaria Rice promised him she would never let his death at the hands of a In 2015, a grand jury declined to indict Officer Timothy Loehmann for shoot- Cleveland police officer be in vain. ing Tamir, agreeing that his use of deadly force was reasonable under the perceived threat that Tamir was a grown man wielding a real gun. Loeh- In that message, which was published in Essence magazine mann eventually was fired from the Cleveland police department for lying on in June, Rice told her son that she knows he will be with her, his job application, not for killing Tamir. The police union continues to stand every step of her fight for his legacy. by him and advocate for his reinstatement. “Ask me how I know?” she wrote. “I feel you when I breathe.” The following year, the city paid Rice $6 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit. After paying attorneys’ fees and disbursing funds among family Today marks five years since 12-year-old Tamir Rice was members, Rice was left with about $1.7 million. For Rice and her children, fatally shot by a Cleveland police officer while playing with a who will never fully heal from the loss of their brother, money is the coldest pellet gun in the park outside the Cudell Recreation Center comfort, she says. While the settlement let her avoid years of painful litiga- on the city’s West Side. Tamir’s death anointed him as one of tion, it forced her to assign a dollar value to her son’s life, and it brought no America’s youngest casualties of police use of deadly force justice for Tamir. against people of color, and his story continues to fuel the Black Lives Matter movement. Samaria Rice recalls that day – Nov. 22, 2014 – in painful fragments. Some of the memories are crystal clear, such as the turkey sandwich and fruit she served Tamir and his sister, Tajai, for lunch before they departed for the rec center. Other details are clouded by the anguish of what came next. Rice remembers riding in the passenger seat of the am- bulance and the doctors rushing Tamir into surgery. She remembers the sense that her child was already gone, even while they gave him blood transfusions and connected him to life support. She also remembers that a cadre of police officers seemed to hover around Tamir’s hospital room, and that in the end, she was told she couldn’t touch her son’s body, because it had become evidence. Samaria Rice had wanted more for her children than what she experienced in her own traumatic youth – a childhood she described as “a whirlwind of catastrophe” that gave rise to a young adulthood plagued by domestic violence, poverty and housing instability. She had done everything she could to provide her children’s lives with structure. She even settled her family in a West Side neighborhood that she thought was safer than most of the other places they had lived. But the reach of multigenerational poverty and institutional racism can be long and pernicious. And Rice’s 12-year son 6

In the years since her son’s death, Rice, 42, has connected with Rice is angry too. She says she had difficulty, in the days after a sorority of mothers from around the country, known as the Tamir’s death, accepting that a police officer would have killed her “Mothers of the Movement,” who also have lost their sons to son. She had encountered police many times in her life and had police use of deadly force. They support one another in text always considered them public servants she could trust. So, when messages and phone calls and appear together at lectures, she finally viewed the surveillance video footage of Tamir’s shoot- panel discussions and protests. Rice also has been surrounded ing for the first time in the presence of her brother, her attorney by activists and artists, who have helped her find ways to keep and Chief of Police Calvin Williams, she collapsed with grief. Tamir’s story alive in the public consciousness and to advocate for police reform in Cleveland and beyond. “Until then, I had been living a private life,” Rice said. “I had seen things on CNN about the deaths of Eric Garner or Michael Brown Tamir’s likeness appears on murals throughout the world, includ- or Trayvon Martin, and I would think, ‘Oh, that’s awful!’ … Then I ing on a memorial in the Palestinian territories. Samaria Rice was look up, and I see me. And I have no words for that feeling.” featured in a documentary film called “Traveling While Black,” and she is involved in the production of another documentary about In the years that followed, Rice steeped herself in the history of Tamir called “12.” racial injustice and police brutality in America. She experienced a kind of painful awakening that gave context to her own life story Indeed, Rice has become an activist in high demand, with an and Tamir’s death and informed the path she would take as an exhausting schedule of speaking engagements and public activist. appearances around the world. This year, she was named to Essence’s list of “Woke 100 Women” alongside Gayle King and “I’m angry and mad and sad and disappointed in America for Michelle Obama. selling me an American Dream that was a lie,” she said. “Because America has no dreams for black and brown people. I trust no- But all of that is what the world sees of Rice’s efforts to find body. I’m damaged and broken, and America made me who I am.” meaning and to keep from drowning in grief. “A piece of my puzzle will always be missing,” she said, touching Rice now lives in Lorain County, where she says she has found her finger to an imaginary jigsaw puzzle on the table in front of some peace and privacy. her. “And there’s nothing I can do but fill that space with a lot of love and work. But it’s still not enough, because I would rather When she lived in Cleveland, Rice said, she would be recognized have my son back.” and approached nearly every day by strangers. Sometimes they wanted to give her a hug. Sometimes they wanted to share their Asked where she goes to feel close to Tamir or to commemorate own opinions of Tamir’s case. And other times, they would simply his birthday or somber milestones like today, Rice surprisingly blurt out, “You’re the mother of that boy who got shot! Right?” said she goes to the Cudell park, where her son spent his final Or they would confuse Tamir with Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old moments. Florida boy who was shot and killed in 2012 by a vigilante neigh- borhood watchman. “His spirit is there,” Rice explained. “I can feel him. He’s playing. I don’t have a special ritual or ceremony on those days. I’m just But Rice seems to have escaped a lot of that in her new suburban there to be near him. Just breathing.” neighborhood, where people keep to themselves, and Rice can sit in her backyard and listen to the fountain of her subdivision’s retention pond. That peace, however, has its limits. Despite her burning moti- vation to create Tamir’s legacy, Rice acknowledges that she is exhausted and hasn’t slept a full night in five years. She often stays awake, reading, researching and writing – or sometimes just looking at photos of Tamir. KELLEY FIRM NEWSLETTER 7

KELLEY FIRM NEWSLETTER Opelika’s historic Ward Funeral Home was torn down, marking the end of a structure that had been in existence for nearly 150 years. Amidst pleas from property owner, Maurice Ward, at an Oct. 1 Opelika City Council meeting, the council voted unanimously to approve a bid from AAA General Contractors Inc. to demolish the home. That decision came after three previous discussions of demolishing the home during the last eight years and granting Ward time needed to begin restoring the home, which had been abandoned for nearly 30 years. More than 60 comments were left on an Observer Facebook post last week about the home’s demolition, which saw mixed emotions from users. Some, including Kelly Broom Cox, favored the demolition, saying that she was “so glad the city is committed to cleaning up!” Others, like Bill Mount, saw the home’s demolition as the loss of yet another structure of historical significance to the city. “Sad day (for Opelika). What a beautiful old place,” Mount said. According to the few records that exist pertaining to the structure’s history, the house was built in 1870 and originally lived in by Dr. Eugene Lindsey and his wife. Lindsey, an African American physician from LaGrange, owned and operated Lindsey’s Drugstore and Soda Fountain on Ninth Street, one of the few places where black citizens could sit and socialize while waiting for their prescriptions to be filled. Later, the structure was turned into a funeral home, which it was best known for housing. The Ward family still operates a funeral home which serves the Valley area. The Observer attempted to reach out to Ward and his family for more information about the home’s history and significance, but declined to comment for this article. Opelika’s historic Ward Funeral Home demolished 8

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