Nearly 400 people buried in Tampa are missing. What happened to Zion Cemetery?

May 9

In the early 1900s, nearly 400 African-Americans were buried in Zion Cemetery on Tampa’s edge, then records stopped. Where are the bodies?

TAMPA — Byron Pressley parked along the side of the road and sat for a few minutes looking out the window of his car. He got out, walked slowly toward a chain-link fence, and asked himself: “Will people watching think I’m crazy?” Pressley, a church pastor, knelt in front of the fence and prayed. Then he stood, took a breath and sang Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross, a hymn popular among African-Americans in the decades after slavery was abolished. Minutes before on this January afternoon, Pressley had learned from a reporter that Tampa’s black community buried its dead for two decades along this stretch of N Florida Avenue — now home to a couple of Columbia restaurant warehouses and the back of the Robles Park public housing complex. There’s no sign today that a cemetery once occupied 2½ acres here, no hint of the squares plotted out on an old map showing nearly 800 graves. Zion Cemetery, the first African-American cemetery recognized by the city, has been forgotten.