GULFPORT, Fla. — A Pinellas County cemetery may soon get some much-needed help once the governor signs the budget.
Historic Lincoln Cemetery is a historic African American cemetery that holds a lot of the county’s history, but the owners say they need help to maintain and preserve that history.
Pastor Clarence Williams says it’s hard to put a price on the names of loved ones along with their dates of birth and death etched in stone at Lincoln Cemetery.
“There are thousands of people buried here,” he said. “People who died in wars fighting for the rights that we enjoy. There are people who started schools. People here who served their country in every war.”
Williams said the Gulfport cemetery is where Black residents in St. Petersburg were buried for years because laws banned them from being buried within city limits.
“What it meant not to be able to be buried next to a white person and how that egregious act forced people to be buried in separate places. But the care was not equally given,” he said.
Pastor Williams is the chairman of the nonprofit Cross and Anvil Services, which owns the cemetery. He worked with local lawmakers to ask for $300,000 from the state to restore and preserve the cemetery that is the final resting place for some of the area’s most prominent history makers.
“It would mean we could continue to have the grass cut and improve this cemetery which is on its way to not just being an afterthought of two cities that really don’t want it — but becomes the center of culture and understanding of what it means and meant to be black in St. Pete,” Williams said.
Williams said they need a new road, drainage and leveling of the land. He says community cleanups have sparked new interest in people coming to visit their loved one’s graves, but there are still some unmarked graves.
Locating and identifying those graves is part of their work being done at the cemetery, but right now, they’re just waiting, hoping the funding goes through.
“The cities deserve help from the state because this is a Jim Crow product. This is not something the city did, and I think it deserves greater consideration,” Williams said.
The governor has until next Friday to sign the budget. He could line-item veto the request, but lawmakers believe preservation of this cemetery will prevail and make the final budget.
