Each month, soldiers volunteer their Saturdays hauling lawnmowers, weed wackers and rakes to two overgrown lots beside a bus stop. They toil under the sun, restoring two of Hampton, Virginia's oldest Black cemeteries.
They mow, hack and rake away the 6-foot-tall sea of grass to reveal the concrete and granite headstones of Elmerton and Bassett cemeteries.
The lots hold some of the most important figures in Hampton's Black history. But thick underbrush covered nearly every trace of the land's significance before the volunteers started their work.
The city of Hampton doesn't maintain either cemetery. Only a handful of volunteer organizations take care of the more than 900 graves dating to the 1850s.
On a recent Saturday, 30 volunteer soldiers arrived not to just help, but to honor the sergeant who introduced them to the work.
Sgt. 1st Class israel Lopez took his final turn clearing the cemeteries before being transferred to Fort Knox, Kentucky. In 2020, he began the volunteer group Unity Through Community with the 1st Battalion, 210th Aviation Regiment.
“This project will probably outlast myself. I take solace in that,” Lopez said. “We get to share so much of the history of this area with people who otherwise wouldn't have known it.”
Local volunteer organizations began cleaning the cemetery decades ago. Mary Christian, the first African American woman to serve as a state delegate, began the…
