Beer Drinking Bros Versus An Ancient Native and Black Cemetery
A North Virginia coalition is saving the gravesite and setting things straight.
Descendants of formerly enslaved Africans and Native Americans in the historic town of Thoroughfare, Va., are fighting for their own history and their own land. It’s land these folks have lived on for at least a century, but apparently it’s also land that someone else wants to — or thinks that — they own.
As the nation deals with an ongoing racial reckoning, the idea of land theft from Black and Brown people is centerstage. Headlines abound, from a California family who had their beachfront resort taken from them in the 1950s to Black cemeteries in Washington, D.C. that were bulldozed by developers.
Thoroughfare is no different, but here, the people are still alive in order to fight back. And Frank Washington, from the Coalition to Save Historical Thoroughfare, says this latest land theft issue stems from a simple task: tidying up the local graveyard.
A family elder became ill, and to honor her end-of-life wishes to be buried in the Peyton Thoroughfare Cemetery next to her husband, Washington and his brother Dulany, commissioned a cleaning and landscaping of the cemetery. What they found were more graves of freed slaves and Native…
