The following is an excerpt from an article about two churches that crossed the color line to honor those buried Paw Creek Slave Cemetery in Charlotte, North Carolina. Read the full article in the June 2, 2009 edition of the Charlotte Observer.
After a rousing worship service at Paw Creek Presbyterian, its white members and black guests from nearby Woodland Presbyterian turned quiet as they paraded to the white church’s 200-year-old cemetery.
Once inside, they kept walking, passing by hundreds of headstones and monuments that spelled out details – names, dates, family titles – of the remembered dead, many of them onetime slave owners.
Finally, this long-overdue funeral procession reached a field of 58 graves, each marked with an old rock and a new cross. Buried beneath them, four feet down instead of six, their bodies originally wrapped in blankets rather than sheltered in caskets, were unnamed black men, women and children who had died in bondage.
