Chapel Hill Unveils New Cemetery Marker

Members of the Black Student Movement and the UNC Gospel Choir sang out Sunday, honoring the 361 slaves and free African-American people buried in the unmarked graves at the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery.

They sang while facing a covered marker. It’s new, and it was revealed Sunday at the “Community Remembrance” ceremony. A first marker was chosen and installed in February by the Cemetery Advisory Board. But it was removed by the town after residents and students complained about how the inscription was worded.

Chapel Hill Mayor Pam Hemminger said this newmarker was a community effort.

“We started out with good intentions from our cemetery committee,” she said. “And made it into a bigger and more expansive process that included a wider community perspective and a deeper historical input.”

Winston Crisp is the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs at UNC. He was also at the ceremony to speak about how important it was that the entire community weighed in on the marker.

“I could not be more grateful to be apart of a community like this one,” he said. “Where we continue to work together to acknowledge our past and to look to our future.”

Chapel Hill Reverend Robert Campbell also attended, and said the community is unlike any other in the way it comes together for moments and events like the one Sunday.

“You know we have youth,” he said. “And we have middle-aged and we have senior citizens. But very seldom is there a bridge between those generations. Today, I believe the work that we’ve done has built a bridge for all the generations to work together.”

Campbell and UNC Black Student Movement President Tre Shockley unveiled the new marker. The new inscription is a quote from George Moses Horton. He was an enslaved poet and intellectual from North Carolina.

The marker reads: “Thus we, like birds retreat to groves and hid from ev’ry eye; our slumb’ring dust will rise and meet its morning in the sky.”

Past Mayor Howard Lee spoke at the ceremony, and said the point of the new marker is so that everyone who walk past it or read it can remember exactly who it’s for.

“The fact that these folk struggled but they were committed,” he said. “They worked hard, they sweat, they did all they could to try and lay the groundwork for those of us who follow.”

The town is continuing its work to figure out the identities of those buried in the unmarked graves. Officials are planning to build a table for the cemetery with all names listed.