A devastated community in Elsmere, Kentucky is calling for volunteers to help clean up a historical Black cemetery that was vandalized this month. According to FOX 19, the perpetrators toppled about 30 grave headstones at Mary E. Smith Memorial Cemetery and spray-painted anarchist symbols on the sign at the entrance. 

Police said the incident happened sometime after Dec. 3, but they haven't found any footage or witnesses, WVXU reported. City officials suspect that the perpetrators could be young people.  

"Regardless of whether this crime was perpetrated by a juvenile, anarchist or racist, it has no place in the city of Elsmere," Mayor Marty Lenof said in a statement. "Our city has a long history as one of the most diverse communities in Northern Kentucky and this criminal act is not just an affront to people of color or those who have loved ones buried in this cemetery but to all people who live in our city."

Matt Dowling, Elsmere city administrator, said, "the use of anarchist symbols in connection with vandalism in a historic Black cemetery doesn't really make sense."

"Most anarchists usually are not racists, but instead believe in social equality and have a distrust of wealth, privilege and government," Dowling said.

Community organizer Chris Brown is one of the volunteers helping clean up the cemetery after getting a call from the president of the Northern Kentucky NAACP chapter. 

"Hate doesn't win here," Brown told FOX 19. "We're gonna restore this place. We're going to fix these stones, we're going to wash off the filthy graffiti that you put on these people's tombstones." 

Crystal Madaris, who visits Mary E. Smith Memorial Cemetery to visit four generations of her family, said it's a special feeling when she walks through the site.

"When I go through the cemetery, it's like walking through my old neighborhood and that makes it special to me," Madaris, who serves as the cemetery's secretary, said. "I think everybody feels that way, that we all have loved ones and friends resting there. It's like a future home, so to speak. A future neighborhood and it makes it special to us."

The cemetery, which was officially founded in 1950, is one of Northern Kentucky's first Black cemeteries, WVXU reported. A volunteer board of directors is in charge of the site.

The destruction of historical Black cemeteries has been seen throughout history. Last year, vandals damaged the Union Baptist Cemetery in Cincinnati, overturning monuments and spraying graffiti at the site which serves as the final resting place for about 120 Black Civil War soldiers, WVXU reported.  

In Austin, Texas, 15 headstones were vandalized earlier this year at Evergreen Cemetery, which was built in 1926 as the city’s first major municipal graveyard dedicated to Black residents, according to KVUE.

"At the end of the day, the Black community is all damaged. We're all damaged because of this," Victor Reed, an East Austin resident, told the news station. 

According to National Geographic, there is no official database to track the number of historic Black gravesites in the country. However, proposed legislation known as the African American Burial Grounds Network Act aims to create a formal database, including grant funding for research and restoration. 

“African American history is American history,” said Virginia Representative A. Donald McEachin, who introduced the act in 2018. “The people that were honored, and how they were honored, speaks to the community they lived in and the times in which they lived.”

In Elsmere, the Black community makes up about seven percent of the city's population, according to the census data. Earlier this year, the city joined the nationwide protests which followed the death of George Floyd, The Enquirer reported. Brown was one of the organizers of the protests, calling for changes to systemic racism and police brutality.

"Whether we are having (a protest) here or in Washington, D.C., it is (the same) system that is enabling the behaviors of the police to continue," Brown said. "People are fed up. If all the small towns became engaged, that's an enormous fraction of people that can inflict change in our government."

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