Rather than the dialogue we have begged for, in September 2025 the City announced its choice to communicate about Vick via the passive, uni-directional, highly controlled medium of its website. Judging by its lax updating of info about prized projects like the baseball stadium — “what’s next? The buildings in the stadium footprint will be demolished soon.” — we knew where this was going. The City of Wilson is nothing if not predictable, and here we are.

One week and a day later, and silence still from the City of Wilson concerning what happened at Vick and Odd Fellows Cemeteries. No information, no explanation, no apology. From where I sit, the silence is an ineloquent “f**k you” to the cemeteries’ descendant communities and to anyone else who cares about what happens to these sacred spaces.

I’m finally in Wilson, and here’s what I saw yesterday afternoon.

 

Learn more about the Tate family plot here. Also, review this video from February 2020. From about 1:10-1:15, I’m walking past the high point of Odd Fellows at the Dawson and Tate plots. You can see a bit of one end of the exposed Tate wall at 1:12, then a section of the missing fourth side abutting the other end a couple of seconds later. That section is gone, scooped up and hauled away, I guess, and dumped wherever they dumped everything else they scraped away.

Here’s Vick Cemetery, post “flattening,” as Rebecca Agner put it.

 

 

And here, video from July 2023, when I walked the full front edge of Vick. The little orange-painted stobs I refer to above are visible in the first 3:30 minutes. You can see how far into the top surface of Vick the excavator cut to flatten the ditch bank.

And finally, is it another broken-up grave marker? Rip-rap? The City isn’t talking.

 

 

Videos by Lisa Y. Henderson, December 2025.