Task Force on Abandoned African-American Cemeteries, Final Report (Florida Department of State, Dec. 17, 2021)

The State of Florida convened a task force and named the word in the task force’s own title. The full 196-page PDF was fetched and read.

CORRECTED 2026-07-14. READ THIS BEFORE QUOTING THE PREAMBLE.

The 1998 findings clause DOES say the dead. Repeatedly. An earlier version of this record printed the eyesores and vermin clauses and concluded: “Eyesores. Property values. Vermin. That is the statutory account of the injury.”

That was false, and it propagated into a draft essay whose entire spine was built on it. Those are two clauses out of TWENTY-SEVEN in the preamble of Ch. 98-268, Laws of Florida (reprinted at Appendix B of this report). Quoting two and characterising the whole is an argument by omission.

The clauses the earlier record omitted, verbatim:

“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”

🔴 DO NOT TRUNCATE THIS CLAUSE. A rewrite cut the final ten words, in which the legislature prices dignity in the same sentence it promises it. Cutting them to prove the law is dignity-centred is the same argument-by-omission that killed the first draft, with the polarity flipped.

“inadequate care and maintenance of a cemetery where a loved one is interred causes added stress and emotional trauma to the deceased’s family and friends”

“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”

“cemeteries that have been abandoned and neglected for long periods can become obliterated, leading to a loss of important historical, genealogical, and archaeological information”

“the majority of the present statutory and regulatory provisions relate to economic problems but not to care and maintenance”

That last clause is the legislature stating the objection against itself and then acting on it.

And the 2021 act that created this task force (CS/CS/HB 37, Ch. 2021-60, preamble, at printed p. 18 of this report (PDF 23), in Appendix A) names Zion by name and declares the state’s obligation to “ensure dignity and respect for the deceased.”

The eyesores and vermin clauses are real and they are verbatim. They may be quoted. They may not be presented as the statute’s whole account of the injury, because they are not.

The words were never the problem. Do not write an essay that says they were.

The 1998 clauses that ARE about property, verbatim: “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.”

Zion Cemetery, Tampa. Established 1901, “is believed to be Tampa’s first African-Americans burial ground,” with room for some 800 graves. Verbatim: “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.”

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

2019. “The Tampa Housing Authority and other private citizens are the current owners of the Zion land.” In June 2019, on learning graves might still lie beneath Robles Park Village, the Authority “organized a consultation committee, hired archaeologists to survey its property, and began moving tenants who live where the cemetery was once located.”

THE NUMBER, verbatim (printed pp. 8-9, the sentence straddles the page break), which an earlier draft never reached: “In August 2019, archeologists using ground-penetrating radar discovered what they believe to be 126 caskets beneath the Tampa Housing Authority land. The Tampa Housing Authority has spent between $70,000 and $80,000 to relocate about 30 families from Robles Park Village. The goal, according to the Tampa Housing Authority, 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. 126 in 2019. Five buildings standing on them.

The mechanism, verbatim, AND ITS TRUE AUTHOR: “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).”

This is NOT a Task Force finding. An earlier version of this record called it “the gap the state’s own report identifies.” It is a public comment letter, reproduced in an appendix, opening “Dear Task Force Members… I am writing in from the perspective of a local government planner… here in Miami-Dade County.” A citizen wrote it. The report did not find it. Attribute it correctly.

And “them” means LOCAL GOVERNMENTS, not builders. Restore the parenthetical. It is not a weakening; it is the mechanism. The state built the register, declined to require consultation of it, and handed the discretion to the counties.

Note on a cited source. At footnote 39 the state’s report cites: Paul Guzzo, Tampa Bay Times, “A Community, Not Just Zion Cemetery, Disappeared To Build Homes For Whites” (Nov. 4, 2019). WR has not retrieved that article and does not rely on its contents; only the fact that the state’s own report cites it, under that title, is used.