Desecration
By Katrina Brooks
2 Jun 2008
Being on this website has motivated me to want to take new photos all the time. I had an idea for a location to shoot today but it didn't work out. Still wanting to satisfy my creative side, I remembered seeing a graveyard from the interstate several times and asked a friend to go with me for safety.
As we wandered around the cemetery, we saw numerous police vehicles and it kept us on our guard a bit. After looking around, I noticed that several of the memorials erected by loving family members had been desecrated and broken. I noticed at one point a group of fifteen or so children on bikes and the cops zooming off to shoo them away.
What has been done to these gravesites is very sad and uncalled for. Some of the headstones are over 100 years old and have been broken by people who just don't care.
I looked online and there is a committee who is trying to preserve Elmwood/Pinewood Cemetery in Charlotte, NC. A battle was just won to keep the light rail train from coming through this historic land that holds the remains of Charlotte's citizens from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Elmwood contains the graves of some of Charlotte's most important citizens textile pioneer D.A. Tompkins, developer Edward Dilworth Latta, former Charlotte mayor S. S. McNinch, and W.W. Smith, Charlotte's first major black architect, are among the hundreds of New South entrepreneurs, builders, political and religious figures buried in Elmwood Cemetery.
Elmwood Cemetery, located in the heart of Charlotte's center city, formed an integral part of the urban landscape at a time when cemeteries served not only as places for interment but as important public green spaces.
The Elmwood/Pinewood cemetery complex was the center of a civil rights controversy in the late 1960s, when city councilman Fred Alexander spearheaded a successful campaign to bring down the chain link fence separating all-white Elmwood from all-black Pinewood.
