Florida city reckoning with its past as paved over Black cemeteries uncovered
  • el año pasado
In the first half of the 20th century, Clearwater Heights, Florida, was a Black neighborhood — thriving, proud and anchored by faith. But being in the segregated south, African Americans couldn't stay at the White hotel, walk on the beach or swim in the bay. In death, they were laid to rest in segregated graveyards.  Those cemeteries were sacred ground until the ground became valuable. In the 1950s, headlines announced that the city of Clearwater made a deal on moving a "Negro" cemetery. Hundreds of African American bodies were to be reburied to make way for a swimming pool. A department store was planned for the site of another Black cemetery, where again, the bodies were to be moved. But O'Neal Larkin remembers, many years later, his first revelation that something was terribly wrong.  "It's not an imaginary thing that I seen. It's what I seen with my own eyes," Larkin told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley. In 1984, Larkin, now 82 years old, watched a construction crew dig a tre
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