Florida man documents lives in crumbling Black cemetery

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) - Michael Swain comes back again and again to Greenwood Cemetery, a largely overgrown burial ground of fallen and half-buried and missing grave markers, armed with a pen and notepads and his camera phone.

He’s there, he said, to visit his “friends,” the people buried at Greenwood, which was for decades a cemetery for Black citizens in a segregated Jacksonville.

“They’re my friends, they’ll always be my friends. I spend a lot of time with them,” he said. “I’d like to see better for them.”

Swain, 38, grew up a mile away from Greenwood, which is on Moncrief Road across from Raines High School. He’s a Jacksonville native, and while none of his family is buried there, it is to him still an important place full of stories, if you know where to find them.

Soldiers from the Korean War, World War II, World War I, perhaps even the Civil War. Teachers. Business owners. Laborers. Nurses.

“All this history being right there, and no one ever took the initiative to go out there and go headstone to headstone,” he said.

He was working at Restlawn Cemeteries, which owns Greenwood, and whose Restlawn South abuts it, when he started going from one headstone to another on breaks from work. He later took a job with Amazon but kept up his visits.

In the last couple of years he’s collected about 200 photographs of gravemarkers, putting them on poster boards for display. He’s found 171 markers of U.S. veterans.

He’s filled up notebooks with what information he can find about the names on those markers - looking online, in old newspapers, in census records and military records.

It’s all written down by hand, not in a computer. “I’m kind of old-school,” he said. “I look young, but I’m not that young.”

Many of the stories of those buried there will never be found.

Many markers are missing, he said, or barely legible. Many are broken or covered by earth. He hasn’t found any maps showing who was buried where. About 100 markers, at least, are now simply leaning up against trees. And many sites have disappeared in the woods that have grown over much of the property.

Nature, in Florida, is tenacious.

Greenwood is far from the only local cemetery in tenuous shape. Across Florida, thousands of graveyards have been abandoned, according to the Department of State’s Division of Historical Resources.

Meanwhile, a 2007 report prepared for the City Council identified 128 known cemeteries in Jacksonville - “the majority of which could be described as abandoned and neglected.” Some fall victim to development and are under retention ponds or parking lots.

The city of Jacksonville does occasional maintenance at some cemeteries, including Greenwood, but that can’t keep up with creeping vegetation, harsh weather and vandals.

Swain said he’s not sure of the actual founding date of Greenwood, though he found a newspaper article from 1910 saying it had been sold as a cemetery.

Clues include some small markers, undated, he said, whose names appear to match with those of Black Union soldiers from the Civil War.

The cemetery also has the grave of Johnnie Mae Chappell, a Jacksonville woman with 10 children, who in 1964 was shot dead by a white man from a passing car during a period of riots and racial tension.

Swain believes that somewhere in Greenwood - he hasn’t been able to find the marker yet - is the grave of Richard Benjamin Lundy (1898-1962). He was known as Dick Lundy, or King Richard, a formidable shortstop and manager in the Negro Leagues for 30 years.

“He won three pennants in Negro League baseball, one of them as a player and coach,” Swain said.

He said he’d like to see Greenwood get some recognition as a historical site.

“I’ve got the motivation. I get these individuals who paved the way for me and my son and other family members to be here today,” he said. “I get hurt, the condition it is in, and that no one has really learned about these individuals.”

Swain wants the knowledge of people who came before them to be an inspiration to his 16-year-old son and others.

“There are a lot of problems on Moncrief Road, but if children knew how great their ancestors were, that would change the community, that there is greatness within,” he said. “The culture that is, it wasn’t always like that.”