Local news from over the past weekend included the sad story about a human skull being found in the woods around the Pleasant Rest Cemetery in Towson, which is a historic Black burial grounds owned by Mt. Olive Baptist Church at Kenilworth Drive and Bosley Avenue.
The police said that someone was walking around the area and found the skull, which has been verified as that of a human, and appears to have been at the location "for decades." There were no signs of trauma.
It's very sad to me that somehow, someone interrupted the pleasant rest of someone at the Pleasant Rest Cemetery.
And the church itself, the Mt Olive Baptist, it has been for years and years a symbol of the originally Black community of Sandy Bottom. A great deal of that area, near where York Rd and Fairmount Avenue meet, was owned, bought and settled by the families of freed once-enslaved people. It was the home of Carver High School, the secondary school for African-American students in our shameful days of school segregation. Once Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) ruled that state-sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th amendment and was therefore unconstitutional, the county enlarged that building and it became Towsontown Junior High School (I'm a proud alumnus!) which closed in 1979, and was used as county offices. Eventually, the George Washington Carver Center For Arts and Technology was built there as a vocational high school where the name Carver lives on.
It's a meaningful area and I hope someone can look into this mystery.
1 comment:
The same night a bone was found elsewhere in Towson… What bothers me is that it doesn’t seem that people are worried about identifying this person, or figuring out what happened to him or her… The reports I saw just claimed that there was no trauma to the skull and it did not come from one of the graves nearby…
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