Some view my insistence on independent investigations into what happened to Vick Cemetery’s headstones; the location of graves in the public right-of-way bordering Vick Cemetery; and how power poles came to be installed in Vick Cemetery as retributive.

They are wrong.

There can be no justice for the dead (or living) harmed by the City of Wilson’s decades of action and inaction at Vick Cemetery. We will never know all the names of the 4224+ dead. We will never recover their grave markers. We will never whose graves — or how many — were cracked open or crushed in the widening of Lane Street or the placement of 90-foot power poles and their attendant guy wires.

What we can determine, however, is HOW THESE OUTRAGES WERE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN and, consequently, what systems, policies, and procedures can be put into place to prevent anything like them from happening again.

Last week, I received a set of photographs that reminded me that Vick Cemetery is not unique in Wilson County and that shortcuts and conveniences (or inconveniences) and indifference and neglect have left their shameful mark elsewhere.

I’ve written of Buckhorn Reservoir and the headstones of Julia Boyette Bailey and Andrew W. Terrell before. In a nutshell, Wilson County Register of Deeds Office’s “Grave Removals” volume, which contains records of every registered disinterment and/or reinterment in the county for the past 50 or so years, contains no record of the removal of the graves of Julia Bailey, Andrew Terrell, or the 16-18 unknown others whose disinterment was publicized in 1998 ahead of the expansion of Buckhorn Reservoir.

As the headstones of Bailey and Terrell attest, the graves now lie at the edge or under the lake. There’s no record because the graves were never removed.

Al Letchworth took this photo of Terrell’s broken gravestone in 2019. It has since disappeared.

Here is Terrell’s foot marker, as photographed by Randy Marshburn last week.

And here are the grave markers of Julia Boyette Bailey, a woman who was born into slavery; grew to adulthood, married, and bore children under its yoke; and lived only four years beyond it. Hers is one of the, if not the, oldest known burials of an African-American person in Wilson County.

Buckhorn Reservoir is the primary water source for the City of Wilson. The City of Wilson is the owner of the reservoir and the dam that created it. Wilson Utilities is responsible for the reservoir’s management.

In 1998, during roughly the same period that the City of Wilson was throwing away headstones and drilling holes in Vick Cemetery to install power poles, it was on the other side of the county flooding black cemeteries to expand its reservoir. 

What failures of process allowed this to happen? How do we prevent further failure? Is the City of Wilson prepared to be transparent about — and accountable for — its errors and misdeeds, or will it continue to whistle past the (figurative and literal) graveyard?

My profound gratitude to Randy Marshburn and Al Letchworth for these photographs and their deep concern for the graves of Julia Bailey and Andrew Terrell.