For nearly two decades, the ground under a parking lot on South Missouri Avenue in Clearwater has been the subject of a quiet, then loud, argument about what the city owes the dead. On Monday, Oct. 19, at 6 p.m., the people who have carried that argument the longest will hold a community meeting at the Willa Carson Health and Wellness Center, 1108 N. Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, under a theme that reads like a directive: "Working together to Recover All."
The meeting was called by the Clearwater Colored Cemetery Society, known as the 3C Society, and its president, Diane Stephens. The group is made up of descendants of people buried in two erased African American cemeteries: the St. Matthews Baptist Church Cemetery, whose graves lie beneath the FrankCrum human resources company's headquarters and the adjacent roadway, and the North Greenwood African American Cemetery, a few blocks away, where graves were found under and around the closed Curtis Fundamental and Palmetto Elementary School and the parking lot of the Homeless Empowerment Program.
Stephens wants anyone who believes a loved one may be buried at either site to come. "We want to dispel all of this talking, and we want them to come to the community meeting. Instead of talking, come on down," she said. "It's very important for us to know where we came from, who we came from, and where we're going from here."
The meeting comes weeks after the Clearwater Community Redevelopment Agency agreed to pay FrankCrum $7.5 million to settle a lawsuit the company filed in 2023. The case was one of the first in the Tampa Bay area to head toward trial over an erased African American cemetery. FrankCrum bought the property at 100 S. Missouri Ave. and later discovered, through ground-penetrating radar and excavation, that hundreds of graves remained there. The company argued its purchase agreement indicated the remains had been relocated, and that the CRA had warranted as much. The CRA's board was expected to approve the settlement on Oct. 12.
The history behind that paperwork is the heart of the story. The St. Matthews Baptist Church Cemetery opened in 1909 and served as the only place Black residents of Clearwater could be buried. It operated until 1940, when city council minutes show the city ended burials there and opened a new segregated cemetery a few miles away — the North Greenwood cemetery, which in turn closed in 1954 to make way for redevelopment. The St. Matthews congregation, burdened by city fees assessed against the cemetery, sold the land in 1955 to a group of businessmen who also owned Parklawn Memorial Cemetery, a Black cemetery in Dunedin.
For decades, the official story was that the graves had been moved. The 3C Society notes that newspaper accounts from the time show the relocations were loudly protested by white residents and challenged in court, and that the only records that might have identified which remains actually left were destroyed when the contracted funeral home went out of business. It is now believed that few, if any, relocations happened.
What the ground itself said was more definitive. In 2020, the city commissioned archaeological studies that confirmed the erasure of both cemeteries. At St. Matthews, the archaeological firm Stantec initially detected 70 graves by radar; a follow-up survey in 2022 brought the count to 328, with historical records suggesting at least 533 people had been buried there. Some areas could not be surveyed at all, including a section beneath the FrankCrum building. At North Greenwood, archaeologists eventually located 29 grave shafts, finding human remains in four of them, after an earlier radar study flagged 55 possible gravesites.
For the families, the discoveries confirmed what elders had said for generations. Carlton S. Childs Sr., who founded the 3C Society, described witnessing the findings five years ago as "very, very disturbing." "We found that it was more graves than we actually knew of, spread out over a much larger area than we even anticipated," he said. Zebbie Atkinson IV, president of the Clearwater/Upper Pinellas NAACP, put it more bluntly to reporters: "The community was told back then that the bodies would be moved. It seems the community was lied to."
Neither side in the settlement claimed a moral victory. The CRA said the agreement "does not reflect an admission of fault for either party," and noted that because the site is privately owned, decisions about the remains rest with FrankCrum. "The people buried at the former St. Matthew Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery, and the families connected to them, have been at the heart of this matter for years and the city recognizes that this site holds generations of history," the agency said, adding that it hopes for "a path forward that honors the families connected to this ground."
FrankCrum, in its own statement, said the settlement was "not a victory for the descendants of the people who were buried in the former St. Matthews Baptist Church Cemetery, and whose graves were nearly erased." The company accused the city and CRA of years of litigation and delay, including an argument that the city's warranty against graves on the property had expired. "Because the City's leadership refuses to lead, it will be up to our community to come up with a solution," the company said, promising to work with "responsible members of the community" on a structured, transparent process in the months ahead.
That leaves the descendants with a legal fight resolved and the harder question unresolved: what happens to the remains now. The 3C Society has long said it wants the graves moved from the FrankCrum property to the North Greenwood site, where the abandoned school still stands. But that land is not theirs to decide. The Pinellas County School Board owns the Palmetto school property, and the Homeless Empowerment Program owns land across from Palmetto where graves have also been found — property the school board sold to HEP.
Stephens said those moving parts, and the group's own vote on what it would like to see happen next, are what she plans to put before the community. No final decision has been made. The meeting is free and open, and its purpose is partly practical: the society needs to hear from more families who may have loved ones in either cemetery, people whose names and claims have never been recorded anywhere.
That is the work the theme points to. The settlement may have closed one legal chapter, but for the descendants of Clearwater's erased cemeteries, the question of where their ancestors rest — and who gets to decide — is still open, and still theirs to press.