ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Erased Black cemeteries across the Tampa Bay area and other parts of the country will be the center of attention at the Black Cemetery Network’s inaugural conference starting Thursday at the University of South Florida’s St. Petersburg campus.
Dr. Antoinette Jackson, USF anthropology chair, founded the group and organized the conference to raise wider awareness of Black cemetery erasure and to strategize memorialization and preservation efforts.
“We don’t want to be here in the same spot next year,” she said. “We want to have more people preserving cemeteries, less people having cemeteries erased by highways, schools, parking lots, and things like that.”…