This year at Real Places, we had the honor of hosting a panel discussion with the caretakers, descendants, and storytellers of Bethany Cemetery in Austin’s historic African American community. Founded in 1893 by and for Black Austinites, Bethany Cemetery is the resting place of dozens of formerly enslaved people, Buffalo Soldiers, and early Black entrepreneurs. Despite its historic landmark status, Bethany has survived constant underfunding, vandalism, and encroachment.
We were blessed to hear firsthand from longtime East Austin civic leader Sue Spears, who has led the Bethany Cemetery Association for the past thirty years. She has seen and done everything from removing abandoned vehicles in the cemetery, paying out of pocket for cleanups, to fighting gentrification in the neighborhood surrounding Bethany. Spears built up an active network of youth volunteers beginning in the 1990s as a PTA member at Sims Elementary, located across the street from Bethany Cemetery. Thanks to Sue, students began letting go of their ghost story myths around cemeteries and started adopting Bethany as a source of community pride, especially during Black History Month.
Since then, the association has been celebrating a string of successes: $95,000 in heritage preservation grant funding from the city of Austin, $50,000 in maintenance funding from a neighboring apartment developer, and an ongoing collaboration with Black Austin Tours on guided cemetery tours. But at the heart of the story is the reality that it has never been easy. Preserving the stones and stories of Bethany Cemetery has been a long journey marked by struggle and loss.
Earlier this summer, we visited Bethany for their Juneteenth event to celebrate the unveiling of new interpretative signage and biography QR codes for the cemetery. The typically joyous Juneteenth mood was interrupted a few days earlier by a damaging hailstorm that toppled several heritage trees in the cemetery and a personal tragedy that befell Sue Spears’ family. Through it all, the volunteer and descendant community that Sue and the Bethany Cemetery Association have built up over the decades showed up on Juneteenth to help and heal one another in a time of need. The community’s sacred ties to Bethany Cemetery remain strong, nearly a century and a half since its founding.