African American Burial Grounds Preservation Fund Amendment Act

On Monday, October 28th, Councilmember Kenyan R. McDuffie introduced the Historic African American Burial Grounds Preservation Fund Amendment Act of 2024, a groundbreaking initiative to safeguard the District’s African American cemeteries and burial sites, which are at risk of erasure due to historical neglect and modern urban development. The proposed legislation would create the Paul E. Sluby, Sr. Historic African American Burial Grounds Preservation Fund, which will be dedicated to the preservation, protection, and maintenance of these historic sites. The Fund is named in honor of Paul E. Sluby, Sr., a revered D.C. public servant and pioneering preservationist who was the first Board-certified African American genealogist and co-founded the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society. Mr. Sluby’s lifelong dedication to the preservation of African American heritage remains a model for the efforts this legislation seeks to support. African American burial sites across the nation have long been vulnerable to neglect and degradation, an issue rooted in the Antebellum and Jim Crow eras, when African Americans were often relegated to remote and under-resourced burial grounds. Many of these cemeteries faced forced relocations and destruction under financial pressures and local regulations. An example is the Columbian Harmony Cemetery, whose graves were controversially relocated without protections for headstones and memorials, leading to their reported sale as scrap. Today, only four historic African American cemeteries remain intact in the District: Mount Zion Cemetery, Female Union Band Society Cemetery, Union Burial Society of Georgetown Cemetery, and Woodlawn Cemetery. Despite volunteer efforts to preserve them, these cemeteries are in various states of erosion and disrepair. The Paul E. Sluby, Sr., Historic African American Burial Grounds Preservation Fund would be administered by the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development and allocate grants to:Preserve and restore historic African American burial grounds;Identify historic African American burial grounds;Repatriate African American human remains, particularly those from former historic African American burial grounds; Research and document historic African American burial grounds, including research on burial records, locational data, and contested ownership