Local civil rights activist Willie Hudspeth and fellow advocates have spent the past 10 years trying to restore St. John’s Cemetery, a historic freedman cemetery on the outskirts of Pilot Point.
Landlocked by private property, it has perhaps 400 burial sites, a majority of them unmarked graves of people from the St. John’s community, a freedman town that disappeared in the 1920s, much like dozens of other Black communities in the South due to racial violence and Jim Crow laws.
Two years ago, Denton County commissioners voted to quit funding the cleanup of the historic cemetery after seven years and left it up to Hudspeth and other volunteers to work out with the landowners.
“We do not fund any other cemetery within the county,” Precinct 1 Commissioner Ryan Williams told constituents. “I think it’s right for us not to be paying for something that we don’t pay [for others in the county].”
The St. John’s Cemetery Association was Hudspeth and other advocates’ response to that decision, and they’re asking people to get involved in their efforts “as they work to uncover the history of the St. John’s community and protect the final resting place of the African Americans who comprised it.”
Last week, the new organization launched the “Buried Twice: Memory, Truth & Justice” series to raise awareness about St. John’s Cemetery and their struggle to get public access to the site, mobilize community support and restore the burial ground.
At least 56 gravesites have been identified — with six of those occurring between 1880 and 1890, marked by large elaborate headstones at the cemetery, according to the group’s “Buried Twice” presentation Saturday at Emily Fowler Central Library.
“It’s just by God’s guidance that we found the cemetery,” Hudspeth told about a dozen people in attendance. “... There was no way I could have found that. You wouldn’t ever have thought it was a cemetery. It was all grown over, large trees all inside the cemetery, all in it.”
Hudspeth was joined by Richard Gladden, a Denton attorney who represents the cemetery association, and Jessica Luther Rummel, a former local researcher who flew in from out of town to host the presentation on Saturday.
“We’re going to kind of dispel some myths and just put some facts on the table so that we’re all in this community looking at this situation from the same point of reality,” Luther Rummel said. “That’s very important these days. I feel like sometimes that’s our struggle. We’re not all sharing the same reality.
“So I want to put these facts on the table today and make sure that they are on the record as we move forward with our fight.”
The Klan
First was recognition of what happened to the St. John’s community that the association connected with Denton’s Quakertown, a freedman community that was forced to relocate from downtown to Southeast Denton in the early 1920s, in part due to heightened racial violence in the region.
Some of the facts offered by the St. John’s Cemetery Association included federal Census data from 1920 and 1930 that revealed “an equally dramatic and rapid reduction in Denton County’s Black population” after nearly 40 years of consistent and exponential growth in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
“Just as was the case in Denton, vigilante Klan behavior and overt threats of racial violence against African Americans who got too close to Pilot Point began to increase around the turn of the century,” Luther Rummel shared in the presentation.
“In an incident so egregious it was covered by The Dallas Morning News in the summer of 1898, a local group of Whitecaps, a term often used by local first-generation Klan circles, erected a large sign in the middle of Pilot Point ordering all African Americans to leave the area, lest they be subjected to violence.”
Threats of lynching followed — as did a 1921 case of two young Black men whom the local Ku Klux Klan abducted from the Pilot Point jail and flogged for being “loafers,” an incident that appeared in newspapers as far away as The New York Times.
“Of course, all of this occurred at the same time that the African American community of Quakertown in Denton was being subjected to racial terror campaigns that included structure fires, written threats delivered by Klansmen on horseback, Klan parades tens of thousands strong through the city Square,” Luther Rummel said.
“And all while being forced to accept pennies on the dollar for their homesteads, which they were forced to relocate to a swamp-like region on the southeast side of town.”
The mystery
Hudspeth first discovered St. John’s Cemetery in 2015 while protesting the Confederate soldier monument on the downtown Square. He had kept up his protests for nearly 20 years before commissioners voted to remove the statue in 2020, not because they agreed with Hudspeth about its ties to slavery and racism but due to public safety concerns.
“‘You’re out here fighting for this statue, but what about the people of the St. John’s Cemetery that is forgotten?’” Hudspeth recalled being asked. “They are forgotten. I didn’t know anything about this cemetery.”
Later, the St. John’s Cemetery Association was able to identify that the cemetery was incorporated into a transaction that involved adjacent land, “the boundaries of which were unlawfully extended by just the right amount so as to include the 1.5-acre plot.”
Subsequent sales of the land followed until the 1960s, when, the association said, the boundaries were corrected by a surveyor who “carved the cemetery out of the previously miscalculated tract.”
Nearly 60 years later, Hudspeth, along with John White, a descendant of the St. John’s community who would pass away in 2021, began working to restore the cemetery after a property owner gave them access to the location.
“We would go to that cemetery and work out there. It was hallowed ground, so it was just the peace that overcame us,” Hudspeth said. “This was during the civil rights incidents that were going on in this country. But we were at peace and in good spirits about being in this place.”
Hudspeth recalled the headstones made of sand and that the wording had been worn off most of the stones. He mentioned children’s graves that he said touched them deeply.
Sitting there among the forgotten graves, he said he made a promise to himself: “To make sure that I wouldn’t let these people just be there and not remembered.”
The dilemma
Luther Rummel recalled the challenges they faced with Denton County officials over the years to restore St. John’s Cemetery.
The county got involved in 2016. It organized a few cleanup days in 2016, another in 2017 and again in 2019. Yet, water erosion “continues to displace potentially vital archaeological data while also supplying a steady stream of new trash into the cemetery,” Luther said.
Luther Rummel said a property owner wanted to do something in 2020 to ensure the future accessibility of the cemetery before he sold his land, only to be told by the Denton County Office of History & Culture that “the public is guaranteed access despite the cemetery being landlocked.
“Unfortunately, this private communication remains the only documentable incident of a county official accurately citing Texas cemetery laws in relation to public access to St. John’s Cemetery, even though it was used to deter a good Samaritan from taking action to ease this access.”
In March 2024, Denton County Judge Andy Eads said the cemetery is not county property and later that summer voted with other commissioners to quit funding the cleanup efforts.
What Luther Rummel said he didn’t mention was that the Texas Historical Commission had notified Peggy Riddle from the county’s Office of History & Culture in January 2024 that it had processed the official Declaration of Dedication for St. John’s Cemetery.
“She informed the state commission that the county would host an event at the cemetery to celebrate and follow up soon with a historical marker application,” Luther Rummel said. “That was 26 months ago.”
Public access
Nearly three years have passed since Hudspeth and other volunteers have had access to St. John’s Cemetery to clean it after an older property owner died in 2023, leaving his property to his children, who limited their access, Denton attorney Richard Gladden told the crowd on Saturday.
Gladden said that state law allows cemetery associations, once recognized by the Texas Historical Commission, to have exclusive control over access to the cemetery and an exclusive right to maintain and restore those cemeteries.
“The law requires property owners to give ingress and egress [for public access to cemeteries] as long as it’s reasonable,” Gladden said.
They’re currently discussing access to the cemetery. Gladden said Commissioner Williams claimed he was asked to be a liaison for the property owners, though Gladden said one of them told him they never requested it.
This week, Gladden said he plans to meet with the property owners to discuss access. He plans also to survey those who signed up at the events last week and do further outreach to find consensus on what would be reasonable access — for example, every other weekend or every weekend.
Hudspeth offered a few final words before the event ended, pointing out that they were trying not to be discouraged.
“The county’s not helping us, and they should,” Hudspeth said. “It seems like the laws are against us, but they’re not. But we’ve been kept in the dark.
“We only want to do one thing: Go out and have access to the cemetery and be allowed to clean it up. I guess the second thing is just get a lawn chair and be able to sit out there and be quiet and just relax and enjoy those people, about what they went through and what they’re still going through now.”
CHRISTIAN McPHATE can be reached at 940-220-4299 and cmcphate@dentonrc.com.
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