These documents concerning the City’s discussion of Vick Cemetery in the half-decade prior to its clearing of the space came to me not via my own public records request, but that of a media outlet. I will publish the memos, with comments, in two parts — the first from 1989-1991, and the second from 1994-1995.
On 2 June 1994, spirited public discussion broke out at a council meeting concerning the cost of Vick Cemetery restoration. This appeared to spark a couple of behind-scenes memoranda.
On 12 July 1994, Deputy City Manager Charles W. Pittman wrote City Manager Edward A. Wyatt to report his discussions with James A. Hill about cleaning up Vick Cemetery. Though Hill indicated he would honor his 1989 proposal, Pittman advised the job would have to be bid out.
The next day, Wyatt wrote the mayor [C. Bruce Rose] and council to advise that the project, done right, would be expensive. “In order to comply with General Statute requirements, extreme care must be taken to improve a cemetery, which will require a lot of careful work to be done. I can assure you that the work will certainly be done in an appropriate manner. It will be administered by Charles Pittman and the Public Works department.” With such firm early avowals, how did things go so terribly wrong?
At the 25 July 1994 meeting, council members resumed the debate. Steve Stancil said he would like to restore the cemetery, but perhaps the City could limit expenditures to $50,000 that year and use unemployed people for manual labor the first year. A.P. Coleman drily responded that “it would have cost the City a lot more money if the City had acknowledged the fact that it owned the cemetery and had maintained it all these years; and that it was a disgrace to not have restored it sooner.”
As we have noted a zillion times, the City’s project description, “Restoration and Improvement S.H. Vick Cemetery Lane St. Wilson, N.C.,” which issued later that year, included these provisions:
- in Section 4A, “All existing graves whether marked by a grave marker or not shall be identified and located so as to be able to be re-located after completion of the work. A detailed survey may be needed in order to ensure that graves are marked in the correct location after completion of the work. A drawing showing all graves shall be prepared for future reference. All existing tombstones shall be removed, labeled, and stored until after all work is completed.”
- and in Section 4E: “All graves identified and located prior to construction shall be re-located and marked. Graves shall be marked in one of two ways: (1) Tombstones removed from graves prior to construction shall be reset at the proper grave locations. (2) Any unmarked graves which were located shall be marked by means of a small metal marker as typically used in cemeteries. A map showing the locations of all graves shall be furnished to the City of Wilson.”
On 3 November 1994, Council voted to award the project to PLT Construction, which began work quickly. However, for reasons yet unexplained, the wheels quickly fell off the original plan.
On 7 April 1995, Charles Pittman sent Ed Wyatt a memo that referred to “much discussion” having “taken place regarding addressing the Vick Cemetery with a central monument versus the individual designated markers.” In the long term, he noted, savings “could be quite [sic] significant when considering the time required to cut grass in an open area versus cutting around individual markers in the cemetery. Cutting around markers requires a lot of manual labor.”
The third paragraph of Pittman’s memo is the gut-punch: “From a public perspective, there has been some concern to the reception of the idea by those who have loved ones buried there.” Thus, contrary to the assertion of current councilmember James Johnson, who was already on council back then, the City was aware that permanently removing individual markers was a touchy proposition. After noting that a public meeting had been set to give family members “a chance to comment on the proposed changes,” Wyatt added, “I have already received one call from Mr. Robbins expressing concern about the graves of four of his family members.”
The public meeting went forward at B.O. Barnes Elementary School on April 24. Public records requests made by multiple parties have yielded no notes, minutes, memos, or other documents showing what occurred at the meeting or for three and a half months after.
Wilson Daily Times, 22 April 1995.
However, on 10 August 1995, Ed Wyatt reached out to Rose and council again. “Staff with other interested persons” — who? — had been working with Joyner’s Memorials on the central monument, “the most feasible way to approach this project.” With a proposed fence (around the cemetery? the monument?) eliminated from the plan, the project would come in at $28,000. “It is the intent not to reset the original monuments allowing maintenance to be held to a minimum.”
On August 18, Wyatt sent a slightly modified version of the same memo.
Councilman Steve Stancil’s acerbic response came four days later. He opposed the central monument, calling it “an unnecessary expense” and questioning “how long this investment would remain intact without destruction.” In his view, cleaning up the cemetery had “fulfilled [the City’s] commitment,” and, with an eye on retaining his council seat, recommended that Wyatt “bring this topic up to Council for another vote after the November election.” Stancil wrapped his memo with finger-wagging: “Ed, it continues to bother me how you seem to justify spending additional money on a project just because the project is ‘in the scope of the budget previously approved.’ I am certain this particular money could be spent on something much more useful for the living.” A brief pencilled scrawl shows that Wyatt passed the memo on to Deputy City Manager Charles Pittman.
Seven days later, the Wilson Daily Times announced the city’s plan to erect a single monument in the middle of Vick Cemetery. “It would help, from a maintenance standpoint, to have one big monument,” City Manager Ed Wyatt said, citing the cost and time required to mow around headstones. Wyatt stated that the City’s public works department would store Vick’s intact headstones. Wyatt also stated that “the general concept of a central monument was first mentioned at a neighborhood meeting.”
We know from the April 7 memo above that this was not true. That memo, drafted two weeks before the “neighborhood meeting” at Barnes school, makes clear that the central monument “concept” had already been discussed at length — and the City knew it was controversial. Nonetheless, folks will try to have you believe that the descendant community, or one or two representative Black people, wholeheartedly endorsed a plan to rip their family members’ headstones out of the ground and replace them with a generic granite obelisk. We rebuke the notion. And where are the headstones???