TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — A dark history long buried beneath the towering oaks and manicured lawns of a country club in Florida’s capital Tallahassee is reviving painful memories of the community’s segregated past and prompting some residents to call for a public reckoning.
Beneath the rolling hills of Capital City Country Club, one of Tallahassee’s most popular neighborhoods, evidence of Florida’s slaveholding past lies beneath the surface in the form of long-lost burial grounds for enslaved people who lived and died on the once cotton plantations.
Across the country, thousands of unmarked and forgotten graves of enslaved people are at risk of being lost as descendants and volunteers battle development and neglect.
Less than a mile from the Florida State Capitol, National Park Service archaeologists have identified 23 unmarked graves and what they believe to be 14 potential graves near the seventh hole of a semi-private golf course that currently operates on city-owned land.
“We know they were enslaved, but who were they?” said Tiffany Hill, a Tallahassee resident whose family manages a historic black cemetery dating back to the 1800s.
More than four years after the Tallahassee City Commission approved a plan to create a monument to preserve and protect the unmarked graves on the golf course, no such monument has yet been erected. Now, city officials are considering selling the land to a country club that has paid a nominal annual rent of $1 for nearly 70 years.
The lease has been in place since 1956, when the club returned to private ownership and allowed it to circumvent a U.S. Supreme Court ruling prohibiting the segregation of public parks and recreation facilities. Some of the club’s former members were unsuccessfully nominated to the nation’s highest court after being questioned about whether they had helped privatize the club to avoid consolidation.
The city received a recent offer from the country club, proposing to sell the 178-acre (72-hectare) golf course to the club for $1.25 million. The legal conditions were that the club operate the property as an 18-hole golf course in perpetuity, and that the city be allowed to construct and maintain a monument to the grave with guaranteed public access.
On Wednesday, after residents opposed to the sale packed City Hall, the commission voted to postpone the matter until its next meeting.
Prospect of sale infuriates activists
The prospect of selling the land that includes the cemetery is infuriating to DeLightre Hollinger, a local activist whose ancestors were enslaved in Leon County. On the eve of the Civil War, three out of four Leon County residents were human property owned by elite white families. Hollinger helped lead efforts to commemorate the rediscovered tomb.
“They were sold on the Leon County auction block, and now we are open to selling them again,” Hollinger said during Wednesday’s commission meeting.
There are only a few known slave burial grounds in Leon County, despite the large number of plantations that once dominated this area, which was the center of Florida’s slave economy.
Now, residents and some commissioners are questioning why it took city officials years to come up with a plan to commemorate the site.
City officials blamed the delay on negotiations over the agreement’s implementation and damage caused by tornadoes that hit the area in 2024.
Telephone calls for identification of people buried at the site
Kathleen Powers Conti, a history professor at Florida State University who specializes in preserving trauma sites and controversial histories, denounced the proposal and called on the city to be proactive in identifying the identities of those buried at the site.
“I’m frankly shocked that in all of these conversations, no one at the country club, no one on the city commission, is actually trying to find descendants of the people buried there,” she said at Wednesday’s meeting.
For Hill and other advocates, the people whose final resting place is another Florida golf course have been denied dignity in life and death for far too long.
“It’s our history,” Hill told the committee. “Maybe my ancestors are among them.”
