Raphael Morris was watching the local news in 2015 when he saw a business owner complaining about overgrown weeds at a local cemetery. He realized the cemetery was one where at least a dozen of his family members were buried.
The following weekend, Morris volunteered to begin clearing the brush with others, relaunching an effort to restore Greenwood Cemetery.
“The property was probably 15 to 20 feet tall in brush and weeds and saplings and what have you,” Morris said. “And you couldn't see a single headstone on the property. Not a one.”
Greenwood Cemetery is celebrating its 150th anniversary and holding its first gala at the Missouri History Museum on Saturday. It was the first non-sectarian, commercial African American cemetery in St. Louis and has gone through a major transformation in recent years.
More than 50,000 people are buried on the almost 32 acres of land in Hillsdale, including notable figures like Harriet Robinson Scott, who, along with her husband Dred, sued unsuccessfully for her freedom from enslavement.
In the 1980s and 90s, the cemetery fell into disrepair and was quickly overgrown by invasive plants like honeysuckle and wintercreeper. Another group, the Friends of Greenwood, took it over and got it onto the National Register of Historic Places, but the group eventually dissolved.
In 2016, Morris co-founded the Greenwood Cemetery Preservation Association and it has since taken ownership of the site. At times, just Morris, who is now president of the association, his wife Shelley and a small group worked to restore the land.
“These souls deserved better than what they were getting,” Morris said. “The families deserved better than they had been afforded, and to be able to honor them, to show them the respect that they have deserved and they were not afforded, it just really, really, really makes you feel good inside.”
Over time, many larger organizations also got involved, including the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, the Missouri Department of Conservation, the Missouri Botanical Garden and Forest ReLeaf. Bellefontaine Cemetery and Arboretum is providing support as Greenwood explores similarly becoming a certified arboretum.
After years of erosion during heavy rain on one of the main roads, work is currently underway to create a paved, permeable road that will be able to absorb rainwater. Multiple organizations came together to support that work, including the American Chemistry Council, Aspire Pavers, the Metropolitan Sewer District, Engineers Without Borders and local universities.
“We have gained friendships in these last few years that have just helped us in so many ways,” said Shelley Morris, Raphael’s wife and secretary of the preservation association. “We're turning this place around. It's becoming a place of beauty. We envision it as being a place that we can provide history, education, a peaceful place to just sit and just think about things.”
Shelley Morris is one of the group’s historians and works to help families find their loved ones on the grounds by looking through records. Because the cemetery has been around for so long, she said the lives these people lived tell a history of St. Louis.
“There's so much history here,” she added. “We have Civil War veterans, Buffalo Soldiers, veterans from almost every war, with the exception of the present-day wars. And we have environmentalists, we have activists that are here, people of religious orders, just all sorts of folks here.”
Shelley Morris has a grandmother and other family members buried here too. For years, she said many people couldn’t visit the graves of their loved ones because the grounds were so overgrown and inaccessible.
“We're making it possible for people to visit their loved ones,” she said. “It's really important.”
At the gala on Saturday, there will be reenactors and musicians who will play some of the music of the blues and jazz artists buried at Greenwood. There will also be a showing of a new documentary that was produced with the help of the Missouri Coalition for the Environment.
Raphael and Shelley Morris also hope the event will be an opportunity to start a new mission — creating an endowment to ensure the future of the cemetery. Shelley said while many historically white cemeteries have funding structures to ensure they are maintained for years to come, that didn’t happen at Greenwood or many historically Black burial places.
“For so long, there was a separatism, separate in life and in death,” she said. “And so this provided a place for African Americans to be buried, but there was no money from those families to establish a perpetual fund or an endowment.”
Raphael said it’s time to find others to do this work because, at 72, the physical labor is taking a toll.
“Hopefully we'll be able to create some sort of an endowment for the cemetery so somebody will be able to continue doing the work that we have put in,” Raphael Morris said. “That's my dream because I would hate to see it go back to what it was.”
Emily Woodbury contributed to this report.
Raphael Morris and Shelley Morris joined St. Louis on the Air to talk about the cemetery’s history, its restoration, and how they’ve partnered with area businesses and nonprofits to make the burial grounds a welcoming space. Jean Ponzi of Missouri Botanical Garden’s Earthways Center also joined the conversation. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or by clicking the play button below.
