CROWNSVILLE, Md. — It’s been shut down for more than 20 years now, but Janice Hayes-Williams will never forget the day she contacted the Crownsville State Hospital trying to find out what had become of a late family member named George Phelps.
“They said, ‘We have a cemetery and it needs work,’ so I called my uncle. I said, ‘I’m going.’ This was 2001,” said Hayes-Williams, “and the tears when we looked down and all we saw was numbers. No name.”
Watch as the community comes together to help identify unmarked graves
Hayes-Williams learned that beginning in 1912 and spanning the decades marred by Jim Crow laws in this country, the unclaimed bodies of African Americans were buried in unmarked graves in a remote cemetery on the property.
She founded a group called the Friends of Crownsville Hospital Patient Cemetery devoted to learning their identities.
“The Maryland State Archives gave us a room, and we discovered one thousand seven hundred and twenty-seven people,” Hayes-Williams told us.
The county convinced the state to transfer ownership of the more than 500-acre property to repurpose it complete with a memorial park to help right an old wrong.
“This memorial at the gravesite and this whole telling the story of Crownsville and turning it into a place of healing absolutely brings people together across racial divides, across all kinds of… it really get to the core of humanity,” said Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman.
The ongoing work to try to identify these unmarked graves has inspired one state lawmaker to try to expand upon that effort well beyond Crownsville.
“They’re call me the Delegate of the Dead,” said Del. Gary Simmons, who is seeking money and new laws to protect such sacred burial sites, “We need to make sure that we’re working with our churches, working with the Catholic Church and all folks to identify unmarked graves or graves that have been relocated, you know, for the purpose of building, right? So we have to keep an eye on that too. That industry—-to make sure that all these open spaces, that there’s somebody there.”
In September, Hayes-Williams will return to the cemetery to unveil what will be known as the Say My Name Memorial.
“16 tons of black granite, all the names, the year and the state you were born in,” she told us in describing the memorial, which remains covered with a tarp for now.
Respect for those who found little in life at the hospital… or in death.
“You can’t go to a cemetery and give respect if you don’t know who’s there,” said Hayes-Williams, “so this is for the families across the nation that are looking for ‘Uncle Bob’. He went to Maryland. We never heard from him again. He’s there.”
