Local civil rights activist Willie Hudspeth and fellow advocates have spent the past 10 years trying to restore St. John’s Cemetery, a historic freedman cemetery on the outskirts of Pilot Point.
Landlocked by private property, it has perhaps 400 burial sites, a majority of them unmarked graves of people from the St. John’s community, a freedman town that disappeared in the 1920s, much like dozens of other Black communities in the South due to racial violence and Jim Crow laws.
Two years ago, Denton County commissioners voted to quit funding the cleanup of the historic cemetery after seven years and left it up to Hudspeth and other volunteers to work out with the landowners…