Black heroes' graves forlorn, forgotten

The students discovered the soldiers' gravestones by chance. They were cleaning up a filthy East Camden park three weeks ago when one of their rakes scratched something hard in the grass.

Nerline Petion, 17, a Woodrow Wilson High School junior, kicked away some broken glass and food wrappers and dug her shovel into the soil. A white slab became visible. Another student brushed away the dirt with a big bristle broom.

The faded stone dated from the 1800s.

The classmates spread out and stabbed at the ground.

Clink. Clink. Clink. Buried headstone after buried headstone.

"We're standing on some people," Petion shouted. "Get back."

The Wilson students had unearthed a historic African American graveyard long neglected by the city.

According to Camden County Historical Society records, the remains of about 250 black residents lie in the trash-strewn ground at 38th and Federal Streets. Among them are 123 members of the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) who served in the Civil War.

In historical society photographs from the 1970s, rows of ash-colored headstones lined the 21/2 acres formerly known as Johnson Cemetery. Some leaned toward the ground. Others tilted to the sky. Most were decorated with small American flags.

"Major restoration" was done to Johnson Cemetery in the 1970s, said Camden's public works director, Patrick Keating. Stones were reset, trees planted, and walkways added.

But the disrepair worsened, with many of the stones either toppling or being vandalized, and instead of attempting further restoration, the city tore up the standing headstones in the 1980s and turned the cemetery into a park.

The bodies were not moved.

"They're still there," Keating said. "I don't know what the process would be for moving them." He doesn't know what happened to the discarded headstones.

The city left the headstones that sat flat, but they sunk into the earth and, until discovered by the students, have lain for years beneath layers of patchy grass and garbage. A peeling, graffiti-covered sign reads, "Johnson Cemetery Park." There is little dignity to the place now.

"What a callous disregard," said Joe Certaine, founder of the Descendants Jubilee Project, a Philadelphia group working with Civil War organizations to identify and restore USCT burial grounds. Two of his relatives served in the USCT.

"This burial place has been desecrated," he said. "That the bodies weren't moved to a more befitting resting place, that there was no ceremony honoring these soldiers, is something that begs for attention and action. This is hallowed ground."

When tearing up the headstones, the city installed a few benches under some shade trees, which have since become a neighborhood drinking spot.

"If it looked like a cemetery, it'd get respected like a cemetery," said a man drinking a brown-bagged beer who did not want to share his name.

During the recent cleanup, the students removed 25 bags of trash, but the park is still grimy. Fluorescent drug baggies litter the ground as if tossed by a flower girl.

The city mows the lawn, Keating said.

"We do what we can with what we have," he said. "We got no people, no equipment, no money."

Many of the USCT veterans in Johnson Cemetery trained at Camp William Penn, just north of Philadelphia. All survived the war, or they would have been buried at battlefields.

At the National Archives in Philadelphia, researchers Andrea Reidell and Graham O'Neill opened Camp William Penn's leather-bound military service books, and the soldiers buried in the forgotten cemetery came alive.

There was 22-year-old Albert Mitchell, standing square-shouldered in a Camden recruiting office in 1865. With an inkwell pen, a white Army officer named Newtz recorded some particulars: 5-foot-71/2 . . . laborer . . . born in Salem County . . . dark skin . . . dark hair . . . dark eyes.

And a letter described the early Christmas present given in 1864 to Pvt. Fred Ray, who played an instrument in the camp band. But now he was being called to the front lines.

Three days before Christmas, Col. Louis Wagner, commander of Camp William Penn, wrote to a superior requesting that as a "personal favor" Ray be allowed to stay with the band.

"Any man has the ability to become a soldier, but not every man can be made a musician," Wagner wrote.

The students discovered Pvt. George Lodine's faded headstone near the back porch of a run-down apartment complex next to the park.

In the winter of 1863-64, Lodine paraded with the 22d Regiment, USCT through Philadelphia. Gen. George Meade reviewed the troops at 12th and Chestnut Streets.

"The men looked admirably well," The Inquirer reported, adding that a "large number of the friends of the colored soldiers" saw the men off at the Washington Street Wharf.

Some months later, at the Battle of Petersburg, the 22d attacked a Confederate fort at sunset, braving withering fire while splashing through a swamp and climbing a steep hill.

"I never saw troops fight better," an officer wrote.

At some point, Camden honored the USCT veterans with a bronze memorial set into concrete at Johnson Cemetery's entrance. But it's gone now, stolen perhaps, Keating said.

The land for the cemetery was purchased in 1854 for $775 by three black men, including Camden's Jacob Johnson, Camden historian Paul W. Schopp said. It was intended as a resting place for black Camden residents. The last burial took place in 1915, Schopp said.

One of the earliest Camden residents interred was Benjamin Brown, 33-year-old principal of the Camden Colored School. He died on a Thursday in 1865. Mourners gathered at his home at 828 S. Fourth St., and a coach carried his coffin three miles to the cemetery.

Camden's first black police officer is buried there, as is Camden County's first black freeholder.

So are many women. The students discovered Elizabeth Matthews' gravestone buried near a maple tree. "Gone but not forgotten," it read.

Ramon Sanchez, a Wilson global-studies teacher, organized the cleanup with the help of the school JROTC, State Police Sgt. Scott Harris, the Camden Fire Department's Ladder Company Three, and College of New Jersey students.

No one knew soldiers were still buried there, Sanchez said, even though students had cleaned the park two years ago. That time they strung a flag up the bare flagpole.

"Someone stole it within two weeks," Sanchez said.

Some souls inside Johnson Cemetery were disturbed over a century ago.

"Ghouls have been at work in Johnson Graveyard," screamed an 1890 Inquirer headline upon the discovery that 28 graves had been robbed. Authorities suspected fiends were peddling the corpses to medical students. A court inquiry revealed that many coffins had been placed only a few feet in the ground. The cemetery superintendent, Nathan Johnson, was arrested.

Certaine is collecting information on Johnson Cemetery's USCT soldiers and has informed national Civil War organizations working to find and restore USCT burial spots in advance of the Civil War's sesquicentennial in 2011.

"This is something we have to make right," he said. "These soldiers deserve better."