10/15/2026
City workers built a playground on a Black cemetery in Dallas. It was the 1960s, and the ground was Freedman's Cemetery, where Black families had started burying their dead in the first years of freedom. Swings and picnic tables went in on top of graves nobody had moved. The families made the city put its promises in writing.
Twenty years later, the state came to widen the freeway next door, and one of those promises was still standing there.
In December 1985, an archaeologist for the Texas highway department was walking the edge of North Central Expressway in Dallas. This was a routine survey, done on foot, ahead of the widening.
The archaeologist came to what one later account calls "an unusual city park."
It had a playground, and it had a big concrete sign. That sign was the promise, and part of it read, "Freedman's Memorial Park, A Public Cemetery." I keep coming back to two of those words, public cemetery, on a sign standing in a playground.
So how does a cemetery end up under a playground?
In April 1869, a man named Sam Eakins bought one acre just outside Dallas. The deed calls him "a trustee for the Colored people of the town of Dallas," which means he held the land for all of them. Freedom had reached Texas on June 19, 1865, the day now called Juneteenth, less than four years earlier.
Eakins paid a white landowner twenty-five dollars for it. The same deed says what the acre was for: "a burying ground for the free people of Color."
I don't know how long it took freed people to raise twenty-five dollars in 1869. I know what they spent it on, which was ground for their dead, with their own trustee's name on the deed.
Most of the people buried in that ground are nameless now. One who is not is Emma McCune. When Sam Eakins bought that acre, she was a girl of thirteen, with thirty-four years still to live.
Other freed families bought land around the acre, and the neighborhood they built was called Freedman's Town. A freedman was what people then called a person freed from slavery. By 1878 the city directory listed seven Black churches in and around it, and some of them ran day schools.
In 1879, seven trustees arranged to buy three more acres for the cemetery. One of them was Rev. A. R. Griggs, a Baptist preacher who had started a school for Black children. He had been brought to Texas enslaved, at nine years old.
For as long as it stayed open, Freedman's Cemetery was the main burying ground for nearly all of Black Dallas. The archaeologists who later worked there estimate that 4,500 to 5,000 people were buried in its four acres, and other counts run higher. Most graves were marked with wood, often at both the head and the foot.
Emma McCune died on May 5, 1903, at forty-seven. She got what most people around her did not, a marker cut from stone. Four years later, in July 1907, the cemetery took its last burials.
Then the ground itself began to go. James Davidson, one of the archaeologists who dug there in the 1990s, describes "a series of unscrupulous land sales" over the years that followed. He counts the city of Dallas among the sellers.
Somebody was making money on ground those families had already paid for.
A railroad had long run along one side of the cemetery. A county historian later found that burials had spilled over onto the railroad's land. In the 1940s the tracks came out, and the state built North Central Expressway along that route.
The Dallas Morning News wrote it up on August 12, 1946, as "a project that promises much relief for Dallas' traffic congestion." Then the paper said what it was hoping for: "It is hoped that no unwarranted delay in the removal of tenants and city-owned houses will upset the schedule in beginning this work."
Houses in Freedman's Town stood in the road's way too. The freeway cut the neighborhood in half and took homes and shops with it.
The road builders also paved over nearly an acre of the cemetery. The dead were still under it.
At the archaeologists' low count, that cemetery held more than a thousand people to the acre. By that count, the road had just gone over something like a thousand of them.
When the freeway opened in 1949, Emma McCune had been in the ground forty-six years.
By 1965, the sales and the road had cut the cemetery from four acres down to 1.22. The city council condemned that last piece and made it a city park in the same stroke. Condemned means the city took it over by law.
City parks workers spread about a foot of dirt across all of it, and the playground went on top. Davidson, the archaeologist, writes that the dirt was apparently meant to smooth the sunken places over the graves and hide the last homemade markers.
On May 3, 1965, a group of descendants signed an agreement with the city. They gave up their claim to the cemetery, and in return the city took on three duties.
It had to keep the place clean and neat. It had to put in concrete benches and a chain link fence. And it had to put up a sign saying a cemetery was there.
The benches went in. As late as 1991, the fence still had not been built.
The sign went up.
The city got its park. The families got the truth about that ground set in concrete, where anybody walking by could read it.
That was the sign the state's archaeologist walked up to in December 1985.
At that point the state's plan was to add lanes on the freeway's east side, away from the cemetery. But the Southland Corporation, the company behind 7-Eleven, was building its new headquarters tower on that side. Through a planning error, the tower went up about fifteen feet too close to the road.
Tearing down a brand-new forty-story building cost too much. So the road's widening moved west, into the park. Moving the dead cost less than moving a building.
By 1987, utility crews working on the tower's construction had dug up at least five graves under a street called Lemmon Avenue. Lemmon runs along the cemetery's north side and meets the freeway there. An application later filed to make the cemetery a city landmark says the remains were taken to "an unknown location."
Five people, and the paperwork cannot say where they are.
And by then, only one readable gravestone was left on the cemetery grounds. It was Emma McCune's.
On August 13, 1989, a Black history group called Black Dallas Remembered stepped in. It went to government agencies and asked what a wider freeway was going to do to the graves. Dr. Mamie McKnight, a Dallas historian, was its president, and the landmark application was written by the group.
People who counted their own family among the buried came forward too. One was Dr. Robert Prince, a physician raised in that neighborhood, whose great-grandfather had been a trustee of the cemetery.
The push worked. The city's park board asked the state to send archaeologists to investigate, and they started surveying in the summer of 1990.
The highway engineers had hoped to move as few as a dozen graves. That is what the Dallas Observer, a weekly paper, reported later.
A side street ran along the cemetery's southern edge. By 1991, Black Dallas Remembered could put in writing what lay under that street's pavement: "broken stone gravemarkers used as pothole filler," with graves still intact beneath.
The phrase on the page is pothole filler, and it is talking about people's names.
Moving the graves out of the road's path took from November 1991 to August 1994. The archaeologists' own account calls it the largest job of its kind ever done in the United States. James Davidson joined the dig in March 1992 and described the site as "part vacant lot and part playground, part construction site and part archaeological excavation."
The archaeologists did not move a dozen graves. They lifted out 1,157 people.
Not one of those graves had a dated headstone, so nobody could say who anyone was. Each burial still got at least twenty-nine pages of records, and five photographers shot more than 185,000 frames of film.
The archaeologists dated the graves by their coffin hardware. Three of every four had been buried between 1900 and 1907. Emma McCune was buried in 1903.
At least 390 of them were babies, two years old or younger.
That number comes from a University of Florida study of the dig's records. It means about one in three of the people in the road's path never reached a third birthday.
The investigators also turned up pieces of broken markers. One line preserved in the record was cut for a boy nobody can identify: "How Much Light, How Much Joy, is Buried with a Darling Boy."
Somebody chose those words for one little boy. Hundreds of other children came out of that ground with nothing left to say who they were.
Everyone the archaeologists moved was buried again on land the city bought right beside the old cemetery. By the archaeologists' estimate, those people were about a quarter of everyone ever buried there.
Donald Payton, a Dallas family historian who claims descent from people buried there, would later say of the dead in that ground: "As we are, they once were, and as they are, we soon shall be."
On Juneteenth 1999, Dallas dedicated a memorial at the cemetery. Emma McCune's headstone is set into it.
After everything that ground went through, the stone is no longer tied to a grave. Nobody knows which one is hers. She may be among the people the archaeologists moved, or she may still lie where she was buried.
I can't give you the names of the people they carried out. I can give you hers, the way the stone gives it: "Emma, daughter of Mary McCune."
And after Emma's dates, one more line: "Gone from our Home but not from our Hearts."
I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter.
If you'd like to support the work, here's the link:
https://ko-fi.com/blackhistorystories
Every coffee helps me keep creating.
