The child’s headstone is inscribed simply “Nannie,” marking the grave of a 7-year-old girl who died May 18, 1856. She is buried in one of Washington’s oldest Black cemeteries, in a neglected corner of Georgetown. For years, she has touched visitors who have left toys, dolls and birthday cards at her grave.

This year on Juneteenth, the June 19 holiday commemorating Emancipation, 200 people visited the Mount Zion-Female Union Band Society cemeteries to see Nannie’s grave and others buried there. The crowd was a big one for the long-struggling burial grounds, adjacent to one another and separated by only a battered cyclone fence from the neighboring Oak Hill Cemetery, the premier final address for Washington’s largely white elite.

“It was amazing” that such a large, multiracial group had come, said Lisa Fager, the executive director of the Black Georgetown Foundation, a nonprofit managing the preservation of the two cemeteries.

After the visitors had gone, someone set fire that night to Nannie’s grave, scorching her tombstone and destroying its decorations.

Georgetown is a moneyed enclave well-monitored by home security cameras and police, but the culprit has not been found.

The vandalism of Nannie’s grave is a reflection of the decay, destruction and desecration plaguing many of America’s Black cemeteries. From tiny, moss-enshrouded plantation plots to sprawling urban sites, tens of thousands of these burial grounds lie in ruins, their history fading or lost.

Three Black women, shocked by the condition of cemeteries in Washington, D.C., Georgia and Texas, have turned their anger into action. None have prior experience in historic preservation, landscape architecture or design. But they view the work as a sacred trust and payment of a debt to ancestors who led the way.

“We stand on their shoulders,” said Margott Williams, who founded a nonprofit entrusted with the care of Olivewood Cemetery in Houston.

In Washington, Fager took on the city and federal government when work crews dug into the border of the Female Union Band Society cemetery to revamp a bike path.

In Midland, Georgia, Yamona Pierce demanded that Georgia Power repair the damage from plowing an access path over graves at Pierce Chapel African Cemetery.

In Houston, Williams pushed a lawn mower the mile to and from her home to Olivewood for months, eventually convincing the county to legally entrust her with the overgrown cemetery’s care.

No accurate count exists of how many Black burial grounds survive.

Brent Leggs, director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, notes that a recent grant competition drew proposals from 5,400 Black cemeteries seeking a total of some $650 million, more than six times the amount available from private and corporate donors. The trust has begun to map Black burial places and offers preservation grants. But the work is slow and the money never enough.

Washington provides little help.

Late last year, Congress passed the African American Burial Grounds Preservation Act, which authorized $3 million for competitive grants to identify, research and preserve Black cemeteries. Congress has yet to appropriate even that.

Mourning graves ‘obliterated’

The gate to Pierce Chapel African Cemetery was padlocked, and beyond it was a trash-filled, overgrown lot.

But Pierce, 53, who had traveled in August 2019 from Washington, D.C., to Midland with her two teenage daughters to find her ancestors’ graves, was determined to press on.

Pierce — there is no known relation between her last name and that of the cemetery — inquired at the Pierce Chapel United Methodist Church across the road. Soon a young man met her, her daughters and two cousins at the cemetery’s entrance. Founded around 1828, the cemetery was a burying place for at least 500 people enslaved on nearby plantations in Harris County.

Soon they were picking their way over downed branches to a few sagging gravestones.

“I felt the pain and hurt that my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother must have felt — the reason they never took us out there,” she said.

The following year, Pierce formed the nonprofit Hamilton Hood Foundation, named for two of her enslaved ancestors, Jane Hamilton and Owen Hood, to educate the public about the historical significance of the cemetery and to raise money for restoring it.

She soon discovered something that infuriated her: Part of the cemetery had been destroyed decades before to make way for nearby utility poles used by Georgia Power and the cable provider Mediacom.

“They cut a road through the middle of the cemetery,” Pierce said. “They bulldozed or obliterated everything.”

John Kraft, a Georgia Power spokesperson, disputed Pierce’s characterization of the construction as a road. He called it a utility right of way and said the work occurred some 80 years ago and that “the property was not well known or marked as a cemetery.”

Thomas Larsen, a senior official at Mediacom, said a company later bought by Mediacom installed its lines on Georgia Power’s poles some 30 years ago and did not damage what he said looked at the time like a junkyard.

But under pressure from Pierce and a council of descendants she organized, the companies removed the lines in 2021. They acknowledge they did not ask any descendants of people buried there for permission to do the work. That is required by state law, Pierce said.

Still, neither company has repaired the damage. Mediacom offered the foundation $2,500 in exchange for a waiver of future claims, an amount Pierce rejected as insultingly small.

Floods threaten Black history

Williams founded the Descendants of Olivewood in Houston 20 years ago, and since then, the work of restoring a cemetery of 4,000 of the city’s earliest Black residents, including a dozen of her ancestors, has been an exhilarating, exhausting journey of highs and lows.

Williams, 60, first learned of Olivewood’s condition in 1999, when her grandmother died and Williams thought the family might bury her in a family plot there. She was shocked by what she found. Out-of-control vines and weeds obscured every family marker, including a regal angel on a tomb at the property’s center.

Her grandmother was interred elsewhere, but Williams could not stop thinking about Olivewood. The cemetery was the final resting place for many of Houston’s Black religious leaders, wealthy merchants, veterans of both world wars and at least one of the Buffalo Soldiers, the Army regiments of Black troops founded in 1866 to serve on the American frontier.

When Williams appealed to local government for help clearing the cemetery, she was told to do it herself.

For six months in 2003, she used a borrowed lawn mower, sickle and rake to clear weeds, which drew the notice and help of the county historic commission. Williams created the foundation that same year. By 2008, the Descendants of Olivewood had gained stewardship of the cemetery and help from the surrounding community to maintain it.

As with many old burial grounds, Olivewood’s biggest threat is water. Uncontrolled flooding from the adjacent bayou made worse by nearby development has been washing graves into the adjoining ravine.

“In Houston, we’re not in love with preservation. We’re in love with development and what brings in the cash,” Williams said.

Olivewood has been recognized as a historic site by UNESCO and the state of Texas. But those honors do not pay to maintain the 7.5-acre site, which receives no government money.

A tale of two cemeteries

It pains Fager when neighbors in Georgetown express dismay at the Mount Zion-Female Union Band Society cemeteries’ disrepair but do not help maintain them, particularly given the largesse expended on the cemetery next door.

That is Oak Hill, a rolling 15-acre site with a lake, fountain and curving walkways lined with 19th-century monuments — the final resting place of, among others, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Katharine Graham, the former publisher of The Washington Post, and Ben Bradlee, the Post’s legendary executive editor. The cemetery is raising money to restore its 160-year-old “Bigelow Iron Fence,” named for its renowned designer, Jacob Bigelow. The $1.8 million project will be funded with private money.

In contrast, the Black Georgetown Foundation, the nonprofit caring for the two cemeteries, has $55,000 in the bank.

“I get paid when we’re able to pay me,” Fager, 53, said.

The National Trust stepped in earlier in this year and gave the foundation a $100,000 grant to help with her salary. Fager was diagnosed with cancer last year; she pays for her treatment partly through a GoFundMe campaign.

Fager has overseen Mount Zion-Female Union Band Society since 2019.

Mount Zion, formerly the Methodist Burying Ground, was founded in 1808 as a cemetery for white and Black people who attended Montgomery Street Methodist Church. The Female Union Band Society cemetery opened adjacent to Mount Zion in 1842. Despite a widely held misconception, the sites are not, Fager said, cemeteries only for enslaved people but are also the resting places of an estimated 10,000 members of Washington’s free Black community.

In 1849, Oak Hill was built for whites only, marking the beginning of the end for the Black cemeteries next door. White families with relatives buried at Mount Zion moved their remains to Oak Hill. Herring Hill’s Black residents began moving away, replaced by wealthy white homeowners.

In 1950, Mary Logan Jennings, a former Female Union Band Society president, was laid to rest in the society’s cemetery, one of the graveyard’s final burials before it was condemned by the city for its disrepair and closed to further interments.

Paul Williams, Oak Hill’s superintendent, said that the cemetery plans to offer its struggling neighbors help with fundraising and cleanup. Last year, the D.C. government allocated $1.6 million for managing flooding at the cemeteries.

The work will soon begin, allowing Fager more room for researching the lives of the people interred in the cemeteries.

“As someone going through cancer, you think about death and what you want to leave behind,” Fager said. “It’s important to get this history to the next generation.”