The indignation of the community is growing over Greenville County’s wrong handling of historic South Carolina Black Cemetery Cleanup

The results of a recent clean -up effort of Brutontown Cemetery, a historic black cemetery in Greenville County, South Carolina, have left black inhabitants and scientists more questions and worries about the condition of the site than before the county started.

Such as Brandon Inabinet, a professor at Furman University, said Fox Carolina During a recent passage of the cemetery, some graves seem to have been destroyed.

“What is really horrible about this place – this is where I think a plantation was cemetery,” Inabinet told the outlet as it stood in a large area of ​​mud. “It was very clear that there were 20 graves here -[they] were completely destroyed. “

Inabinet, who started investigating the history of the cemetery ten years ago, discovered that the first president of the university who currently employs him was a slave, one of whom was laid in the cemetery to rest at the cemetery.

The apparent use of heavy equipment on the site disrupted inabinet, as he told the exhaust valve, in the interest of preserving the graves, the use of that type of equipment is not acceptable.

‘We have no area to look for now [him] Because it’s pure mud now, “he said.” There is no way to know where that Simms family plot is more because it is gone. With a historic cemetery you never use heavy equipment. Someone had to have animus, had to have a real feeling that this is not a location, is not a location of dignity, because the kind of damage you see here is not the kind of damage that you can cause unintentionally. “

Greenville County, however, defended his choice to use a seller to perform the work at the cemetery via a statement afterwards Fox Carolina asked them to clarify what happened.

“Because this site deserves respect and the right attention, the province chose to engage a seller to erase the property that had been neglected for decades. We did this because no one else in the community had been performed to do this level of work … The seller of the province did nothing wrong.

This reaction did not go well with the professor: “To blame the people who are buried here because they did not have the money to make it look like Spring Field Cemetery … I find that horrible, and the county should not say that,” said Inabinet.

He also indicated that the dignity of the remains of the people made for slave should have been priority when the work was done.

“If I answered from an academic point of view, I would say,” To know the genealogy, to find the history of this area, “but it is so much more that their dignity is being restored.”

According to Wyff News 4In 2024, Greenville County initially claimed that it owned the country on which the cemetery is located and thereby take the lead when cleaning up. However, Civil servants have since changed their numberAnd apparently neither she nor the redevelopment authority of Greenville County has the country containing the cemetery.

According to Wyff’s report, the country is still mentioned as the ownership of a church group of the 1800s, Society Ground, and in the same real estate report it also indicates the country as ‘provincial property’, of which the leaders of the province say that the result is an administrative error.

As a result, nobody really knows who the country should have under control and is therefore responsible for the clean -up effort.

Ondanks deze ingewikkelde puinhoop, zowel Walter Patton van de Upstate Cemetery Preservation Alliance, en Robin Coon, een Cemeterian die zowel Brutontown Society Ground Cemetery als Walcott Cemetery in 2024 bestudeerde, zeggen dat de manier waarop de opruiming werd benaderd onjuist was, bij de kritiek van Professor Inabinet.

“We are not satisfied with the way it was cleaned. There are track marks over the entire cemetery. You can see where the vehicle or whatever it was. The machine rode repeatedly in the same place,” Patton told the exhaust.

Greenville County Councilman Alan Mitchell, who has spent a significant amount of time trying to unravel the question of who owns the cemetery, also noticed in his comments that the equipment that the supplier has selected by Greenville County seems to be inappropriate, taking into account the task.

“I was a bit disturbed because the equipment used was heavier than I expected,” Mitchell noted.

According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, the test in Greenville County, as well as on other cemeteries made in the south, the treatment of black cemeteries is a violation of the thirteenth amendment.

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