'Most endangered' status could help Olivewood Cemetery raise needed funds

When Vickey Shaw puts on old clothes and grabs a can of bug spray and a rake, the hard work she does at Olivewood Cemetery in Houston’s Old Sixth Ward is personal. Up to 10 members of her family are buried at Olivewood, the oldest incorporated Black cemetery in Harris County where many former slaves are buried. The cemetery near White Oak Bayou northwest of downtown had been abandoned and ignored for many years until a neighborhood group discovered it and set out to clean it up. Their work has spanned decades and took the 7.5-acre cemetery from a place so overgrown you couldn’t see a gravestone, to one that pulls in dozens of volunteers for Saturday cleanups twice a month. This week, Olivewood Cemetery gained a new status, — a sort of good news/bad news announcement — making the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s annual 11 Most Endangered Historic Sites list.

“We’re trying to keep Olivewood on the map and on people’s hearts and minds,” said Shaw, 60, who is on the Descendants of Olivewood Cemetery board. “These are our forefathers. They laid the foundation for us so I don’t have to walk in the back door of a restaurant or work as a maid. Both my grandmothers were maids, but I went to college. It wasn’t always like it the way you see it today.” For 35 years the National Trust has released its carefully vetted list of historic sites that are endangered and in need of protection. In addition to Olivewood, this year’s list includes centuries-old cave drawings in Missouri; the original site of the Jamestown, Va., settlement; adobe buildings that once housed Buffalo Soldiers at Camp Naco, Ariz.; an elementary school in Humatak, Guam; the Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, N.C., a finishing school for African American women; the Minidoka National Historic Site in Jerome, Idaho, where 13,000 Japanese Americans were interned during World War II; the Deborah Chapel Jewish mortuary in Hartford, Conn.; the East Hampton, N.Y., home and art studios of James Brooks and Charlotte Park; and more than 40 Chicano/a/x murals in Colorado. Perhaps the best known site on the list is the Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Ala., a sanctuary to civil rights activists who were beaten by Alabama State Troopers as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, a day known as “Bloody Sunday.”