Opinion | D.C. should commit to telling the whole story of Columbian Harmony Cemetery

Sarah Jane Shoenfeld is a public historian and co-founder of Mapping Segregation in Washington DC.

On Aug. 23, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) traveled to a site in King George County, Va., where thousands of gravestones lie along the Potomac River’s shoreline and underwater. The stones marked the burial sites of some 37,000 Black Washingtonians who were buried at D.C.’s Columbian Harmony Cemetery, on and around what is now the Rhode Island Avenue-Brentwood Metro station and a Home Depot.

Columbian Harmony Cemetery was one of at least three Black burial grounds purchased by White real estate investor Louis H. Bell in the 1950s to 1960s with the promise that everyone who had been laid to rest at these sites would be disinterred to a new site in Prince George’s County, National Harmony Memorial Park. Bell had acquired an old cemetery there and expanded it with the purchase of adjacent land. In 1958, he bought Columbian Harmony for $400,000, and in 1967, he sold the land to the D.C. government for about $3.5 million.

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Burials at Columbian Harmony included founders of Howard University Law School and Georgetown’s First Baptist Church, some of D.C.’s first Black police officers; leading educators, attorneys, scholars and civic organizers; business elites and political leaders; and hundreds of Civil War veterans. Yet the D.C. Health Department streamlined the removal of their remains by issuing a single permit for all the disinterments. Bell offered their headstones for use as riprap along the Potomac. He designated an acre of his new cemetery in Landover as the “Harmony Section,” but there is no evidence that all or even most of the coffins were removed from the Rhode Island Avenue site.

A longtime resident of the neighborhood around Columbian Harmony recalled to The Post in 1982 that “they placed the bones in boxes the size of tissue boxes” as machinery was used to dig up graves over the course of two years. “Generally, there was some concern about whether or not all of the bodies were actually moved,” said then-Ward 5 D.C. Council member William Spaulding. Local papers reported that coffins and human remains were unearthed and damaged by bulldozers at least twice in the 1970s. As recently as 2014, an archaeological survey in one section of the site showed that most of that area was still filled with remains and, in some cases, entire coffins. If this sample is representative, then thousands of people may still be buried in the vicinity of the Metro station and under the buildings and parking lots that surround it. To this day, the city has not acknowledged that most of those buried at the site might never have been moved. Those who did go to Landover ended up in mass graves without individual markers or even a complete list of names displayed to show who was buried there.

In the early 1980s, community members voiced their dismay at the likelihood that most of the burials at Columbian Harmony were never exhumed — including those of soldiers who should have been reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery — and they worked to establish an appropriate memorial at the site. A Howard University student’s design for a commemorative plaza was chosen in a contest, but it never materialized.

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The nonprofit History, Arts, and Science Action Network (HASAN) is leading an effort to recover Columbian Harmony’s headstones from the Potomac River and transfer them to National Harmony Memorial Park, which the Bell family sold to a national conglomerate in 1998.

In the Aug. 23 ceremony, which was also attended by Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) and Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D), who has committed $4 million to HASAN’s work, Bowser said she had charged D.C.’s Commemorative Works Committee with ensuring that “this story is properly told.” This story should include an accounting of what happened to those who were buried at Columbian Harmony, and it should acknowledge D.C.'s neglect in ensuring their remains were treated with respect.

The list of people buried there should be widely publicized, and D.C. should support the efforts of those who wish to determine whether their ancestors were among them. These descendants likely number in the hundreds of thousands. The Bell family, which profited greatly from the sale of Black cemeteries to D.C., might be called upon to contribute to this effort.

Given that the city has committed $47 million for new development in the same area where it oversaw the removal of D.C.’s most significant Black cemetery, it can surely find the means to help recover this history.

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