Tallahassee, Florida– TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — A dark history long buried beneath the towering live oaks and manicured lawns of a country club in Florida’s capital city of Tallahassee is reviving painful memories of the community’s segregated past and fueling calls from some residents for a public reckoning.
Beneath the rolling hills of Capital City Country Club in one of Tallahassee’s most sought-after neighborhoods, evidence of Florida’s slave-holding past lies just beneath the surface, in the form of long-lost burials of the enslaved people who lived and died on the plantation that once filled with cotton there.
Throughout the country, several thousand unmarked and Forgotten graves to Enslaved people We are at stake From loss, while grandchildren and volunteers fight development and indifference.
Less than a mile from the Florida State Capitol, National Park Service archaeologists have identified what they believe are 23 unmarked graves and 14 possible graves near the seventh hole of the golf course, which is semi-private and currently operates on city-owned land.
“We know they were enslaved. But who were they?” said Tiffany Hill, a Tallahassee resident whose family maintains a historic black cemetery dating back to the 1800s.
More than four years after the Tallahassee City Commission approved plans for a memorial site to preserve and protect unmarked graves on the golf course, no such memorial has been built. Now, city officials are considering selling the land to the country club, which has paid a nominal rent of a dollar a year for about 70 years.
This lease has been in effect since 1956, when the club returned to private ownership, allowing it to avoid a US Supreme Court ruling prohibiting the separation of public parks and recreational facilities. Among the club’s former members was a judge whose nomination to the country’s highest court failed after he faced questions over whether he helped privatize the club to avoid a merger.
After recently receiving an offer from the country club, the city proposed selling the 178-acre (72 hectare) golf course for $1.25 million to the club — with the legal condition that the property be permanently operated as an 18-hole golf course and that the city be allowed to build and maintain a cemetery memorial site, while ensuring public access.
After residents opposed to the sale rallied at City Hall on Wednesday, the commission voted to postpone the issue until its next meeting.
The prospect of selling the land that includes the burial grounds is something that irritates Delighter Hollinger, a local activist whose ancestors were enslaved in Lyon County, where three out of every four residents on the eve of the Civil War were human chattel owned by elite white families. Hollinger helped lead the campaign to commemorate the rediscovered graves.
“It was sold at an auction in Leon County, and now we are ready to sell it again,” Hollinger said at Wednesday’s commission meeting.
In Leon County, there are only a few known slave burial sites, although there are dozens of plantations that once dominated the area, which were the center of Florida’s slavery economy.
Now residents and some commissioners are questioning why it took city staff years to work on plans to memorialize the site.
City officials attributed the delay to negotiations on activating the agreement, as well as devastating hurricanes that hit the area in 2024.
Kathleen Powers Conti, a history professor at Florida State University who specializes in preserving trauma sites and contested histories, denounced the proposal and urged the city to work proactively to identify people buried at the site.
“I was frankly shocked that in all of these conversations, no one at the country club, no one on the City Commission was actually looking for the descendants of these people buried there,” she said at Wednesday’s meeting.
For Hill and other advocates, the people whose final resting place is now another Florida golf course have been denied dignity for too long — in life as in death.
“It’s our history,” Hill told the committee. “It could be my grandfather over there.”
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Kate Payne is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America It is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.