HEMPSTEAD, Texas — As graveyards go, the public cemetery here couldn't be lovelier: shaded, peaceful, well-maintained. "It looks like everybody dead over there is having a family reunion under the trees, it's so nice and pretty," said resident Lisa Ragston.
Ragston, who is black, visits her father's grave regularly. Not at the pretty Hempstead Cemetery that she -- and everyone else in town -- calls the "white cemetery," but 150 yards away in the "black cemetery," a parched expanse of broken headstones and sunken graves strewn with trash.
"It's a mess over there," said Ragston, who makes sure her father's grave, at least, is clean. "Why am I paying taxes to keep the white cemetery nice when the black cemetery looks like that?"
A group of local black ministers in this farm community 50 miles west of Houston is asking the same question, pressing the mayor to take responsibility for property they say is owned by the city. The city has assumed for decades that Hempstead's two black cemeteries -- named Houston and Oakwood -- are on private land. After weeks of controversy, city leaders ordered a search of property records dating to the 1800s. An opinion on whether the city owns the title is being prepared by an attorney hired by the city, and may be presented as soon as this Monday's council meeting, said Mayor Hayden Barry. "This isn't a black-white issue. It's a legal issue," said Barry, who is white.
The Rev. Walter Pendleton, a minister pushing for change in this town, population 4,691, said it took his group one afternoon at the Waller County courthouse to trace the land back to the city. Why it's taking the city weeks to reach a title opinion is beyond him. "If they're searching for an owner, all they gotta do is look in the mirror," he said.
Few took Pendleton seriously in 1986 when he planted a sign in his yard after a frustrating search for his mother's grave in Oakwood Cemetery. "Stop Black City Cemetary Discrimination," it read. As the years passed, his sign became part of the neighborhood landscape, no more noticed than his periodic appearances at city hall. "The dance never happened," said Pendleton.
The grass and garbage were knee-high in Houston Cemetery this spring when several black ministers broke from the town's established ministerial alliance to form what they called "The New Voice." They were fed up with graveyards that looked like junkyards, and vowed to do something about it.
