transparency

Lane Street Project: day 4, and we continue to await an explanation, an update, a plan.

Imagine you were a city council member in a certain mid-size eastern North Carolina city. Imagine learning one morning that in your district, a quarter-mile from your own front door, city-contracted excavators had scraped the ditch alongside two historic cemeteries, exposing and damaging headstones and concrete kerbing.

What would your public response be?

Tell me you would have one.

The city placed cones around the damaged marker late Friday morning. But look left. Is that another?

No? Neither you nor any of the other six council members, nor the city manager, nor the assistant city manager put in charge of the project?

No.

Photo courtesy of C. Facey.

Redux: Buckhorn Reservoir and the graves of Julia Bailey and Andrew Terrell.

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.

Lane Street Project: the unanswered emails to city officials.

I surely hope that when residents contact council members for ordinary constituent services, they get better service than this. Don’t be fooled by performative politics, folks. Watch what they do, not what they say. (If they say anything at all.)

In the minutes after the May 11 open forum on the Vick Cemetery GPR report, Mayor Carlton Stevens and Councilmember Gillettia Morgan asked if I could provide a few fast-action items prior to council’s next agenda work session on June 1. Here was my response:

After four days of silence, I wrote:

Morgan replied; the Mayor did not:

I responded with thanks and another quick-hit item.

Morgan promptly responded with the attachment enlarged below.

She provided an update of actions taken by council, noting that the land survey was complete; the surveillance cameras were in place; and New South Associates had okayed and would oversee installation of a fence. She also agreed to place a copy of the GPR report with the library and requested that I provide a copy of my presentation as well. No mention of the independent investigation. Or the reconsecration. (For the record, there is a reconsecration service planned at Vick on August 5, but it is not City-planned or -sponsored. I reached out to two local ministers who got the ball rolling.)

I was a little confused about the “survey” part and asked if a survey map had been produced already.

Morgan’s answer is ambiguous. I initially assumed that by “survey report” she meant a land survey map, but I now think she meant a final GPR survey report.

I responded with some notes about the survey flags and urged that the areas at the edges of the cemetery be scanned with GPR. I did not receive a response to this email.

Fifteen days later, I wrote to ask for confirmation that the City had not ordered the contractor to prepare a survey map. The City is not being transparent, I asserted. In keeping with the theme — no response.

I followed up after four days. Crickets.

On June 29, I emailed all seven council members, the Mayor, the city manager, and the various city officials whose fingerprints are all over decisions about Vick Cemetery. I repeated my request, first made in December 2019, for a full survey map of Vick. (Note that some people received duplicate emails. That’s because, in a shocking lapse of cybersecurity and public records protocols, several council members conduct city business using personal email addresses.) Not one person responded.

Twelve days later, I circled back to ask the Mayor and Councilmember Morgan their positions on the survey map. Neither has responded.

On July 13, I asked City Clerk Tonya West to confirm that the GPR report provided on April 18 was not the final version and to ask if the final would include updates from New South’s June 29 activity. West has not responded.

On July 23, I emailed West and city attorney Jim Cauley a public records request for documents related to Vick Cemetery. Details of the request to come. Neither West nor Cauley has acknowledged receipt of the request.

——

Expect more. Demand more.

We want a full survey map of the property.

We want GPR work completed at the edges of Vick and in the public right-of-way, and we want a soil penetrometer survey of any wooded areas as recommended by New South Associates.

We want engagement with the descendant community on any proposals for restoration and repair at Vick Cemetery and certainly before any decisions are made about anything, including fences and parking lots. There’s much more to talk about.

We want transparency and accountability.