ABANDONED

Zion opened in Tampa in 1901. The state’s own report, quoting the Tampa Bay Times, calls it “believed to be Tampa’s first African-Americans burial ground,” with room for some eight hundred graves.

Eight hundred. The state’s 2021 act, which names Zion, says that after slavery African Americans faced “restrictions on burying the dead, which resulted in segregated cemeteries and burial grounds.”

The easy story, which is wrong

There is a version of this essay that writes itself, and I had it written.

It goes like this. Florida has a law about neglected cemeteries, and before its provisions the law sets out its findings, which is where a statute tells you what problem it thinks it is solving. And the findings say this:

“a large number of cemeteries in Florida have no entity responsible for their care and maintenance and have become abandoned, overgrown, dilapidated, and otherwise neglected, creating eyesores and decreasing neighboring property values, and WHEREAS, neglected cemeteries become breeding grounds for mosquitoes, rats, and other vermin, raising serious public health concerns”

Eyesores. Property values. Vermin.

There it is. The state of Florida, asked what is wrong with a forgotten grave, answers that it lowers the price of the house next door. The dead are not the victim in that sentence. The dead are the nuisance.

It is a devastating paragraph and every word of it is verbatim.

And it is two clauses out of twenty-seven.

What the legislature actually said

Keep reading the preamble. It is right there, on either side of the sentences everyone quotes. (Bold inside quotations in this casefile is added.)

That the “families and loved ones of the deceased who are interred in Florida deserve well-maintained cemetery facilities which provide the highest dignity and respect accorded to the deceased’s final resting place that is compatible with reasonable and practical economic constraints.”

Read that clause twice, because Florida does something extraordinary in it. It promises dignity and it prices dignity, in one breath, in the same sentence. The qualifier is not a betrayal of the promise. It is the promise, as an appropriations problem.

That inadequate care “causes added stress and emotional trauma to the deceased’s family and friends.”

That it is “an affront to the dignity of our departed and a source of pain to their families when grave spaces are overgrown with weeds and tombstones are broken and scattered due to neglect.”

That abandoned cemeteries can become “obliterated, leading to a loss of important historical, genealogical, and archaeological information.”

And then this, which is the legislature making my own accusation, against itself, in 1998, and then acting on it: that “the majority of the present statutory and regulatory provisions relate to economic problems but not to care and maintenance.”

Florida saw the objection coming and wrote the answer into the law.

Twenty-three years later it did it again. The act that created this very task force, with Zion named in its text, declares the state’s obligation to “identify and properly record abandoned African-American cemeteries and burial grounds in order to preserve history, better inform development decisions, and ensure dignity and respect for the deceased.”

So the words were never the problem

This is the harder essay, and I would rather have written the other one.

The other one lets you believe that the machinery of erasure runs on cold language, and that the remedy is warmer language. Get the statute to say dignity instead of property values and something will change.

Florida said dignity. It said it in 1998 and it said it again in 2021 with Zion written into the text of the bill.

When the state’s task force reported in December 2021, five apartment buildings stood over what archaeologists believed to be a hundred and twenty-six caskets.

You cannot fix this by demanding better words. The better words already passed, and no floor vote against them was recorded.

House Bill 3763, in 1998: one hundred and ten to nothing in the House, thirty-eight to nothing in the Senate. CS/CS/HB 37, in 2021: one hundred and seventeen to nothing, forty to nothing.

Four floor votes, twenty-three years apart, and not one recorded nay in either chamber. Florida agreed, in 1998 and again in 2021.

What one planner told the state

The state keeps the map. One county planner told the state’s task force that local governments, especially those without preservation programs, do not have to look at it unless a local ordinance requires it.

Florida keeps a Master Site File. The state’s report calls it “the State of Florida’s official inventory of historic and cultural resources.”

Here is Adrienne Burke, a planner with thirteen years in Florida planning and zoning, writing to the task force from Miami-Dade County, in an email the state printed in its own report. She is not a task force member. She wrote as a local government planner, in the public input the report reprints:

“the reality of local government, especially those without preservation programs, is that there is nothing that requires them to look at the Florida Master Site File during the site plan and permitting process (unless there was a local ordinance requiring it)”

Read the parenthesis, because the parenthesis is the whole thing. On her account, the check is not forbidden. It is not required. She is writing about local government, “especially those without preservation programs.”

She wrote that to the state. The state printed it in its own final report.

That is not a conspiracy and it is not a cover-up. On her account, it is a local permit process that does not have to ask a question.

What the survey counted

In 1927 three organizations put out a study of Black Tampa.

J. H. McGrew of the National Council of the YMCA, with Arthur Raper of the Interracial Commission and Benjamin Mays of the Tampa Urban League, produced a typed study of how twenty-three thousand people lived. Named chairmen of fact-finding groups gathered the material: fourteen in the copy held by the State Archives of Florida, thirteen in the copy held by the Tampa-Hillsborough County Library System. Black volunteers, “schooled as to exact use of the house cards,” collected housing and sanitation data on about four hundred Black living quarters.

Working from the 1925 precinct population, “Verified and brought to date by conference with old inhabitants,” the study placed 23,123 of the city’s Black residents in eight settlements. Two hundred more lived in the white residence areas, most of them in a house on the back of the landlord’s lot, which brings it to 23,323, the study’s own total. The arithmetic closes.

Robles Pond is one of the eight.

“Robles Pond has a population of 315 - all old inhabitants - many home owners. It is one of the oldeat [sic] Negro neighborhoods in Tampa. The Negroes lived in this area first, but it has been surrounded by Whites and is now confined to its former boundaries.”

Robles Park Village, the housing project later built over Zion, carries a similar name.

The study tabulates the dead as carefully as the living. Five hundred and thirty-four Black deaths in Tampa in 1926, broken out by sex, by age band, by cause to one decimal place. Ninety-six stillborn children, forty-seven percent of the city’s total. A death rate of 22.9 per thousand against 11.1 for whites. Fifty-seven more deaths than births in a single year, a figure the study carries into a parenthesis and spends as an argument for building a YMCA.

Zion had room for some eight hundred graves in 1901.

It lists the trade. Four Black undertakers and embalmers, “all of whom hold degrees from creditable embalming schools,” in practice from three years to sixteen.

It tabulates the churches. Forty-two of them, 9,171 members. It puts a value on twenty-three of the forty-two, and it came to $539,925. It lists what the buildings were made of, down to Tents 2.

In the pages this file holds, the study has no Black burial ground.

Burial itself is in the document. Outside the photographs on page seventy-four, in the pages this file holds, it appears three times and never once as a place. It appears as “Burial Claims, re-imbursement of expenses” and “Headstone Applications,” two lines on a Red Cross list of federal benefits for ex-service men. It appears as a trade with four proprietors. And on page sixty-two it appears as a column heading in a table of women’s lodges, “Burial Association,” with two figures under it: three hundred and fifty dollars, one hundred dollars.

A claim, a trade, and a fund with a balance.

Page seventy-four is a photographic plate headed NEGRO HOMES AND RENT QUARTERS. Both photographs are of cemeteries.

“College Hill / Negro homes, owned or rented by Negroes are located on all sides of this Italian cemetery.”

“College Hill / The houses in the background are owned by white people and rented to Negroes. On the other side of this Spanish cemetery there are many Negro homeowners.”

The survey stood in a Black neighborhood and photographed the graves of other people.

And it typed the word. Page fifty-seven: “The Mt. Zion Private School is located on Michigan Avenue near 25th Street. The teacher is a member of Zion Church, and for five years has been the church organist.” Zion is a schoolhouse in this document, and a congregation, and a line on the denominational table. In the pages this file holds, it is never ground.

Where Black Tampa’s dead went, the pages this file holds have no line to leave blank.

McGrew’s was not the only survey over that ground. Twelve years earlier the Sanborn Map Company had drawn Tampa for fire underwriters, lot by lot, recording what every building was made of, because that is what a fire cares about. Its 1915 sheet covers the blocks west of North Florida Avenue in full. It crosses the avenue to put down a few dwellings and a church, and it records what the church had inside it.

Stoves. Oil lamps. Then the drawing stops and the paper is blank. The key map at the front of that volume gives the ground beyond no sheet number, and no sheet in the volume covers it. Woodlawn, the cemetery to the southwest, is drawn on that same key map and lettered by name.

Two records, twelve years apart, both of them careful, and neither one puts a burial ground on that avenue.

The Library of Congress holds nineteen Sanborn volumes for Tampa and has scanned nine. The scanning stops in 1922. The volumes that would show what went up on that ground, 1931 and 1951, are held and unscanned. Even the imaging stops before the disappearance.

Then the crews came.

Nineteen fifty-one

The state’s report contains this sentence.

“In 1951, while building the Robles Park Apartments, construction crews found three caskets on the land that includes part of the Zion cemetery site.”

They found the caskets.

They found three caskets while building, and the apartments went up. Robles Park Village, the Tampa Housing Authority says, “was developed in 1951.”

Then families moved into Robles Park Village, over ground where crews had found three caskets.

What the radar found

In August 2019, archaeologists ran ground-penetrating radar over the land.

They found what they believe to be one hundred and twenty-six caskets beneath Tampa Housing Authority property.

By the report’s date the Authority had spent between seventy and eighty thousand dollars relocating about thirty families out of Robles Park Village. Its stated goal, in the report, is to “demolish the five buildings that sit on top of the cemetery and create a memorial park that honors those resting underground.”

Three caskets in 1951. One hundred and twenty-six in 2019.

The right you cannot reach

There is one more thing in Florida law, and it is the one place in this file where a family with a buried ancestor is handed something.

Section 704.08, passed in 1980, eighteen years before the dignity clauses. Read it whole, because the whole of it is the point.

“The relatives and descendants of any person buried in a cemetery shall have an easement for ingress and egress for the purpose of visiting the cemetery at reasonable times and in a reasonable manner. The owner of the land may designate the easement. If the cemetery is abandoned or otherwise not being maintained, such relatives and descendants may request the owner to provide for reasonable maintenance of the cemetery, and, if the owner refuses or fails to maintain the cemetery, the relatives and descendants shall have the right to maintain the cemetery.”

Shall have. Twice. The law does not make you argue for this. It hands it over.

And then look at what it routes through.

The owner of the land may designate the easement. You have a right to walk in, and the man who owns the ground decides where you walk.

Such relatives and descendants may request the owner. Before you may lift a fallen headstone, you must go and ask. And only when he “refuses or fails” does the right to maintain your own dead spring into being.

Every single thing this statute gives you, it gives you through the person standing on top of your ancestors. That is not a flaw in the drafting. The statute assumes a cemetery with an owner, and a family who knows which cemetery.

And it has one more requirement, which the statute never says out loud.

You have to know where your dead are.

“The cemetery disappeared from public view in the late 1920s,” the report says, and “a storefront, warehouses, and Robles Park Village were built on the land that once was the site of the African-American cemetery.”

A right that activates only when you can point at the ground is not a right once the cemetery has “disappeared from public view” and buildings have gone up on the land.

The word

So what does abandoned mean here.

No record in this file says anyone walked away from Zion. The word puts the leaving on the leaver and then names no leaver, which is the trick of it: things become abandoned the way weather happens. No hand, no date, no decision.

Nothing in this file says its families abandoned it.

It was abandoned by the record. By the state’s account it “disappeared from public view in the late 1920s,” and buildings went up on the land. Crews found three caskets there in 1951. The Tampa Housing Authority, which the state’s report names among the current owners of the Zion land, now writes that “There was suspicion the cemetery was not properly removed,” and the state’s report says the Authority acted in 2019 “upon learning that graves from the Zion Cemetery might still lie beneath” its apartments.

The state of Florida convened a task force about this, and put the word in the task force’s own title, and the word is still doing exactly what it always did.

Addendum

Added 2026-07-31. This essay published on 26 July 2026 without the section “What the survey counted.”

It is here because a document was read that had not been read before: J. H. McGrew’s “A Study of Negro Life in Tampa,” 1927, read in full on July 31, 2026, in the copy held by the State Archives of Florida. Nothing above it was wrong. Corrected 2026-09-23. That sentence was wrong, and so is part of the section it introduces. The errors are named in the Correction below. The closing argument was being asserted where it can now be shown.

One thing that reading turned up has to be said plainly, because the tempting sentence is the false one. The study does contain the word Zion. It names Mt. Zion Private School, and Zion Church, and A.M.E. Zion on the denominational table. In the pages this file holds, it does not contain Zion Cemetery, or any Black burial ground. In those pages the study names Zion in three senses and never once as ground where anyone is buried. Anyone quoting this piece should quote it that way.

Correction

Corrected 2026-09-23. This essay published on 26 July 2026. Eight errors are named here rather than quietly repaired.

The 1915 map does not show benches. The essay, the image description, and the caption said the Mt. Carmel A.M.E. Church was annotated with benches. The mark inside the building reads “13’ TO EAVES,” its height. The stoves and the oil lamps are on the sheet. The benches are not.

No record in this file puts Zion on a map or a register in 1951. The essay said the families moved out “because in 1951 nobody was required to look at a map that already existed,” and that Zion “fell out of the register.” The state’s report does not say either thing, and neither survey in this file shows a burial ground there. The planner quoted above names the same limit herself: her point does not reach “cemeteries not yet on the FMSF.”

The essay said a housing authority built the homes. The report names the Tampa Housing Authority as an owner of the land today. It does not say who built the apartments.

The essay treated Robles Pond and the Zion site as the same ground because they share a name. No map or survey in this file places them on the same land.

The Zion facts are the state’s report quoting the press. Every fact in the report’s Zion passage is footnoted to the Tampa Bay Times or WTSP. The essay and its docket presented them as the state’s own findings.

The clauses quoted here are not all on the eyesores page. The essay said they were “on the same page, above and below.” Three of the five sit on the page before it.

The essay cited the planner’s email to a page number it does not carry. It is in Appendix G, on two printed email pages with no report page number.

One sentence had no source. “Nobody told them,” of the families who moved into Robles Park Village, is cut.

One claim is narrowed, not retracted. The essay said the laws passed with “no vote against it.” The record is four floor votes with no recorded nay. It now says “no recorded vote against it.”

Source: Florida Department of State, “Task Force on Abandoned African-American Cemeteries, Final Report,” 17 December 2021, fetched again and checked passage by passage on 23 September 2026. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Tampa, 1915, sheet 63, read at full resolution the same day.

Corrected 2026-10-01. This casefile published on July 26, 2026. A second reading of the whole casefile against its primaries found seven more errors, named here rather than quietly repaired.

Two quotations were not the study’s words. The casefile quoted the two captions on page seventy-four of the 1927 study as “Negro homeowners and Negro renters live on all sides of this Italian cemetery.” and “Note the Negro rent quarters in the background. On the other side of this Spanish cemetery many Negroes own homes.” The typescript reads “Negro homes, owned or rented by Negroes are located on all sides of this Italian cemetery.” and “The houses in the background are owned by white people and rented to Negroes. On the other side of this Spanish cemetery there are many Negro homeowners.” Both now quote the page as typed. The source record this casefile relies on carried the same paraphrase under a banner calling it verbatim; it is corrected too.

The study’s count was called total, and its method misdescribed. The casefile said the study “placed every living Black resident of the city in one of eight settlements,” that three organizations “sent a man to count Black Tampa,” that volunteers “walked the streets and filled them in,” that “They counted well,” and that “They counted the dead as carefully as the living.” The study says “The majority of the Negroes in Tampa live in eight areas,” places two hundred more in the white residence areas, and bases its figures on the 1925 precinct population, “Verified and brought to date by conference with old inhabitants.” Its volunteers’ house cards covered housing and sanitation, about four hundred living quarters. Those sentences now say so, “They counted well.” is cut, and the study “tabulates” its dead.

A story about Zion’s ground had no source. The casefile said that somebody “counted the people they expected to have to bury, and bought the ground before those people had died,” that “They dug it because it was theirs,” and that Zion was “paid for against deaths that had not happened yet.” No document in this file says who laid Zion out, who bought the land, or why. Those sentences are cut. The opening now quotes the 2021 act’s own preamble on “restrictions on burying the dead, which resulted in segregated cemeteries and burial grounds,” without suggesting the act explains how Zion began.

A county planner’s point was stated as the state’s act, and as a universal. The casefile said Florida “made checking the map optional,” that “The state built the map, and then made looking at it optional.”, that the discretion “was handed down,” that the state “left the decision to the counties, where it becomes nobody’s job in particular,” and that “no permit process was ever made to ask about it.” The email the casefile quotes is from a county planner and speaks of “the reality of local government, especially those without preservation programs,” where nothing requires a look at the Florida Master Site File “unless there was a local ordinance requiring it.” The same report says that “When proposed development, where a cemetery is located, triggers a state permit application,” the Compliance and Review program within the Division of Historical Resources “can then be provided with an opportunity to comment on the project.” No record in this file shows what any permit process asked about Zion. The excerpt, the section now headed “What one planner told the state,” the closing section, the box and the Word of the Week entry now say what the email says. “the official register of the state’s known archaeological and historic sites, and it exists precisely so that the location of a thing like Zion cannot simply evaporate” now quotes the report: “the State of Florida’s official inventory of historic and cultural resources.”

Facts from 2021 were stated as present. The casefile said “there are still five apartment buildings standing over the graves.” Those facts come from the state’s report of December 17, 2021. The Tampa Housing Authority’s own page now says: “In 2025, Robles Park Village began demolition.” This casefile has not confirmed what stands on the cemetery footprint today. The subtitle, the body and the docket now date the five buildings and the relocation spending to the report.

A preamble clause was quoted without its qualifier. The casefile said “the existing statutes” relate to economic problems. The 1998 preamble says “the majority of the present statutory and regulatory provisions relate to economic problems.” The quotation now carries those words.

The study’s people, pages and burial grounds were misdescribed. The casefile said “Fourteen chairmen of fact-finding groups, Black Tampa’s own physicians and ministers and teachers, gathered the material.” The study’s collaborators page lists thirteen chairmen; it gives titles but no occupations. That sentence now reads “Thirteen named chairmen of fact-finding groups gathered the material.” The casefile said “In eighty-four pages there is no burial ground.” Page seventy-four photographs two cemeteries; what the study lacks is a Black burial ground. That sentence now reads “In the pages this file holds, the study has no Black burial ground.” and “It appears three times and never once as a place.” now begins “Outside the photographs on page seventy-four, in the pages this file holds,”. “It is never ground.” now reads “In the pages this file holds, it is never ground.”, and “That is the whole of it.” is cut. Page numbers now follow the handwritten numbering of the University of South Florida Digital Commons copy, read from its page images for this correction: “Page fifty-eight” now reads “Page fifty-seven,” and “page sixty-five” now reads “page sixty-two.” Every statement here about what the study does not contain rests on two readings: the reading in full on July 31, 2026, of the copy the State Archives of Florida publishes on Florida Memory as item 326639, which is not retrievable today, and the University of South Florida copy, which lacks typed pages sixty-four, sixty-five and seventy-two. Each such statement in the body, the docket and the Addendum now says it covers the pages this file holds. The docket’s “84 pp.” and “READ IN FULL, all 84 pages, 31 July 2026.” are cut and replaced by that account of the two copies, and the Addendum’s “eighty-four typed pages, all of them.” now reads “read in full on July 31, 2026, in the copy held by the State Archives of Florida.” Its “What it does not contain is Zion Cemetery, or any Black burial ground at all.” now reads “In the pages this file holds, it does not contain Zion Cemetery, or any Black burial ground.”

Smaller changes made at the same time, each quoted as it was and as it now reads:

• The subtitle’s “Florida’s law says dignity.” now reads “Florida’s 1998 law says dignity.”, and “It passed twice with no recorded vote against it” now reads “It and a 2021 act passed with no recorded floor vote against them.” Committee votes are not recorded here; the floor votes are.
• “nobody recorded a vote against them” now reads “no floor vote against them was recorded.”
• “Florida agreed. Florida has never stopped agreeing. And the buildings are still there.” now reads “Florida agreed, in 1998 and again in 2021.”
• “She is a member of the public, telling them how it actually works:” now reads “She wrote as a local government planner, in the public input the report reprints:”, and her quoted sentence now begins at the clause “the reality of local government, especially those without preservation programs,”.
• “Nobody contradicted her.” is cut.
• “It is a permit process that does not ask a question, in a state whose statute book is full of the answer.” now reads “On her account, it is a local permit process that does not have to ask a question.” The planner’s own email says “Current statutes do not deal with pre-development, as that falls to local government planning and zoning processes.”
• “Before the state built a register, and before anyone decided that consulting it was optional, three organizations sent a man to count Black Tampa.” now reads “In 1927 three organizations put out a study of Black Tampa.” No record in this file dates the register.
• “The permit process that came later declined a question it could have asked, about a register that already existed. That is bad enough. This is earlier and it is worse. There was no question to decline.” is cut, and “Black Tampa’s dead were counted to the person by Black Tampa’s own doctors and ministers. Where those people went, the survey had no line to leave blank.” now reads “Where Black Tampa’s dead went, the pages this file holds have no line to leave blank.”
• “They counted the trade.” now reads “It lists the trade.”, and “They counted the churches.” now reads “It tabulates the churches.”
• “They were digging, and they brought up three caskets” now reads “They found three caskets while building,” the report’s words.
• “because in 1980 nobody imagined it needed saying” is cut.
• “and a storefront went up, and warehouses, and then a housing project.” now quotes the report in its order: “a storefront, warehouses, and Robles Park Village were built on the land that once was the site of the African-American cemetery.”
• The Mt. Zion quotation now runs to the end of its sentence: “and for five years has been the church organist.”
• “carries the same name” now reads “carries a similar name.” The study names Robles Pond; the housing project is Robles Park.
• “there was no longer any question about what was under there, and they built anyway.” now reads “and the apartments went up.”, “over ground that three caskets had already come out of.” now reads “over ground where crews had found three caskets.”, with the Authority’s “was developed in 1951”; “Everything after that moment is a choice made with the answer in hand.” is cut; “They raised children there,” is cut; and “The crews knew in 1951, and the knowledge did not travel, and a fact with no keeper is a fact a city gets to stop having.” is cut. No record in this file says what the crews or anyone else knew after 1951.
• “That count bought ground. This one recorded none.” is cut.
• “Thirty families moved out of homes built on a graveyard, at public expense, because in 1951 the crews found the caskets and kept building.” and “They were the second people moved off that ground.” are cut.
• “The families of Zion were not stripped of the right to tend those graves. They were stripped of the graves’ address.” is cut, and “and no one is required to check the map.” is cut.
• “Nobody walked away from Zion.” now reads “No record in this file says anyone walked away from Zion.”, and “But the cemetery was not abandoned by its families.” now reads “Nothing in this file says its families abandoned it.”
• “it is the only place in this file where a Black family is handed something.” now reads “it is the one place in this file where a family with a buried ancestor is handed something.” The statute is written for “the relatives and descendants of any person buried in a cemetery.”
• The closing, “It is missing from the surveys and from the maps, no permit process was ever made to ask about it, and the paperwork a right depends on does not know where it is. And the record was the only thing that could have saved it.”, now says what the report and the Authority say: that Zion “disappeared from public view in the late 1920s,” that “There was suspicion the cemetery was not properly removed,” that the Authority is among “the current owners of the Zion land” as of the report, and that the Authority acted in 2019 “upon learning that graves from the Zion Cemetery might still lie beneath” its apartments.
• “Zion was laid out for eight hundred.” now reads “Zion had room for some eight hundred.”, and the box’s “Your state keeps a register of archaeological sites” now reads “Your state keeps an inventory of historic and archaeological sites,” with the planner’s own words.
• The subtitle’s “and there are still five apartment buildings standing over the graves.” now reads “and five apartment buildings stood on the cemetery site when the state reported in 2021.” The hook line’s “Florida wrote the better law, twice, and the graves are still under the buildings.” now reads “Florida wrote the better words, twice, and in 2021 buildings stood on the cemetery.”
• “The study names Zion three times” now reads “In those pages the study names Zion in three senses.”
• A note that bold inside quotations is added now follows the opening of “What the legislature actually said.”
• In the docket: the McGrew item no longer says the study places “all 23,323” in eight settlements, “RECORDS NO BURIAL GROUND,” or “THE NAME ZION APPEARS THREE TIMES”; its page numbers follow the USF copy; the Zion item dates the relocation spending to the report; “A CITIZEN’S EMAIL” now reads “A LOCAL GOVERNMENT PLANNER’S EMAIL (APPENDIX G, PUBLIC INPUT)”; the McGrew item’s absence claims now read “IN THE PAGES THIS FILE HOLDS, IT RECORDS NO BLACK BURIAL GROUND” and “In the pages this file holds, it never appears as ground.”; and three items are added, carrying the 2021 preamble, the report’s state-permit sentence and the Housing Authority’s page, with its address.
• The Word of the Week entry: “Nobody abandoned Zion.” now reads “No record in this file says who abandoned Zion.”; “It was sold, paved, built over, and the buildings went up while the graves stayed where they were.” now reads “It was built on: a storefront, warehouses, and Robles Park Village.”; “passed it twice without a vote against, and left the checking of the map optional.” now reads “passed two acts with no recorded floor vote against them, and a county planner told its task force that, for local governments without a local ordinance, nothing required checking the state’s inventory of sites.”; and “The graves are still under the apartment buildings.” now reads “Five apartment buildings still stood on the cemetery site when its task force reported.”

Later the same day, a docket quotation of the 1998 preamble was found cut short of its qualifier. The docket’s item on the 1998 preamble said that “the families and loved ones of the deceased” deserve “the highest dignity and respect.” The preamble says they “deserve well-maintained cemetery facilities which provide the highest dignity and respect accorded to the deceased’s final resting place that is compatible with reasonable and practical economic constraints.” The item now carries the whole clause, as the body already did.

Sources: J. H. McGrew, “A Study of Negro Life in Tampa,” typescript, 1927, University of South Florida Digital Commons copy, page images read on October 1, 2026; Florida Department of State, “Task Force on Abandoned African-American Cemeteries, Final Report,” December 17, 2021, Appendices A, B and G and the Division of Historical Resources pages; Tampa Housing Authority, “Robles Park Village History,” tampaha.org, read on October 1, 2026; Florida Senate bill pages for HB 3763 (1998) and CS/CS/HB 37 (2021), read on September 30, 2026.

Corrected 2026-10-02. The box at the end said: “REFUSE is a word an institution wrote into its own regulations.” The correction published the same day to REFUSE found that the 1856 regulation says “offal,” and that “refuse matter” is in the faculty’s earlier minutes on the demonstrator’s duties. The box now reads: “REFUSE is a word an institution wrote into its own minutes.”

Source: Jodi L. Koste, “Anatomical and Surgical Training in Nineteenth-Century Richmond” (VCU Scholars Compass, 2012), read on October 2, 2026.

Corrected 2026-10-17. This casefile published on July 26, 2026. Two sentences in the section on the statute said more than the record supports, named here rather than quietly repaired.

No source says the ground was paved or a map redrawn. The casefile said a right that activates only when you can point at the ground “is not a right once the ground has been paved and the map has been redrawn.” The Task Force’s report says “The cemetery disappeared from public view in the late 1920s, and a storefront, warehouses, and Robles Park Village were built on the land that once was the site of the African-American cemetery.” It does not mention paving, and no source read for this casefile says any map was redrawn. The sentence now says such a right is not a right once the cemetery has “disappeared from public view” and buildings have gone up on the land.

How the 1980 statute would have read was inference. The casefile said of the statute: “In 1980 it would have read as ordinary and reasonable, because it assumes a cemetery with an owner, and a family who knows which cemetery.” Fla. Stat. § 704.08 as enacted by chapter 80-238 says nothing about how it would have read. The sentence now stops at what the statute assumes: “The statute assumes a cemetery with an owner, and a family who knows which cemetery.”

Source: Florida Department of State, “Task Force on Abandoned African-American Cemeteries, Final Report,” December 17, 2021, the Zion Cemetery section; Fla. Stat. § 704.08 and its history note, ch. 80-238. Read on October 17, 2026.

Corrected 2026-10-19. This casefile published on July 26, 2026. Two quotations of the statute in the docket carried capitals the statute does not, named here rather than quietly repaired. The docket item quoted Fla. Stat. § 704.08 as saying the relatives and descendants “SHALL HAVE” an easement, and “SHALL HAVE” the right to maintain the cemetery. The statute prints “shall have” in ordinary type both times. The casefile’s note that bold inside quotations is added covers bold, not capitals. The words were exact; the capitals were ours. Both quotations now read as the statute does.

Source: Fla. Stat. § 704.08, The 2026 Florida Statutes, The Florida Legislature (leg.state.fl.us). Read on October 19, 2026.

Corrected 2026-10-19. This casefile published on July 26, 2026. One word inside two quotations was corrected without saying so, and one cited title was printed without its hyphen; both are named here rather than quietly repaired. The casefile quoted the Tampa survey as calling Robles Pond “one of the oldest Negro neighborhoods in Tampa,” in the docket and in the section on the survey. The typescript reads “oldeat.” A quotation keeps its source’s errors. Both quotations now read as typed, with [sic] after the word, and the source record’s transcription is corrected to match. The Source line of the October 2 correction gave Jodi Koste’s title as “Nineteenth Century”; her title page prints “Nineteenth-Century,” and the line now does too.

Source: “A Study of Negro Life in Tampa,” typescript, the Robles Pond paragraph (page 10 of 86 in the scan held by the University of South Florida Libraries, Digital Commons); Jodi L. Koste, “Anatomical and Surgical Training in Nineteenth-Century Richmond” (VCU Scholars Compass, 2012), title page. Read on October 19, 2026.

Corrected 2026-10-19. This casefile published on July 26, 2026. One count was corrected against the wrong copy, named here rather than quietly repaired. The 1927 study survives in at least two copies. The State Archives of Florida copy, the one this casefile read in full on July 31, lists fourteen chairmen of fact-finding groups; the last is “F. Barnby Leach—Supt. Seamen’s Church Institute.” The Tampa-Hillsborough County Library System copy, scanned by the University of South Florida, lists thirteen. The casefile said fourteen. The October 1 correction read the second copy, called fourteen wrong, and changed it to thirteen, without saying the copies differ. Both counts were true of their own copies. The sentence now gives both and names each copy. The two copies also differ on their title pages: the State Archives copy reads “Made By J.H. MCGREW,” and the Tampa copy names no maker. The casefile’s credit to McGrew follows the copy it cites, and the docket, which named two of the three organizations on that title page, now names all three. On the one body page compared, the State Archives copy’s page 8 and the Tampa copy’s scan page 10, the two copies are the same typing, line for line, and both read “oldeat,” so the October 19 correction that set “oldeat [sic]” holds for both.

Source: “A Study of Negro Life in Tampa,” typescript, 1927, the State Archives of Florida copy (Florida Memory item 326639, pages 1, 2 and 8, as archived by the Internet Archive on June 22, 2026) and the Tampa-Hillsborough County Library System copy (University of South Florida Digital Commons scan, pages 2, 3 and 10). Read on October 19, 2026.