by Daniel Johnson
August 25, 2025
Greenville County, nevertheless, defended its selection to make use of a vendor to carry out the work on the cemetery.
The outcomes of a current cleanup effort of Brutontown Cemetery, a historic Black cemetery in Greenville County, South Carolina, has left Black residents and students with extra questions and considerations concerning the state of the location than they’d earlier than the county started its cleanup effort.
As Brandon Inabinet, a professor at Furman College, instructed Fox Carolina throughout a current walk-through of the cemetery, among the graves seem to have been destroyed.
“What’s actually atrocious about this spot—that is the place I feel a plantation cemetery was,” Inabinet instructed the outlet as he stood in a big space of mud. “It was very evident that there have been 20 graves right here—[they] had been fully destroyed.”
Inabinet, who started researching the historical past of the cemetery a decade in the past, found that the primary president of the college that presently employs him was an enslaver, considered one of whom, Abraham Simms is believed to have been laid to relaxation on the cemetery.
The obvious use of heavy tools on the web site disturbed Inabinet, as he instructed the outlet, within the curiosity of preserving the graves, the usage of that form of tools will not be acceptable.
“We now don’t have an space to search for [him] as a result of it’s purely mud now,” he mentioned. “There’s no solution to now know the place that Simms household plot is anymore as a result of it’s gone. With an historic cemetery you by no means use heavy tools. Someone needed to have animus, needed to have an actual feeling that this isn’t a web site of significance, will not be a web site of dignity, as a result of the form of harm you see right here, will not be the form of harm you are able to do unintentionally.”
Greenville County, nevertheless, defended its selection to make use of a vendor to carry out the work on the cemetery by way of an announcement after Fox Carolina requested them to make clear what occurred.
“As a result of this web site deserves reverence and correct consideration, the County selected to enlist a vendor to clear the property that had been uncared for for many years. We did this as a result of no one else locally had stepped up to do that stage of labor…The County’s vendor didn’t do something incorrect. What the clearing work did was expose the harm that had already occurred from many years and many years of neglect,” Bob Mihalic, the Greenville County Governmental Affairs Director, instructed the outlet.
This response didn’t sit nicely with the professor, “Accountable the people who find themselves buried right here as a result of they didn’t have the funds to make it appear to be Spring Subject Cemetery…I feel that’s heinous, and the county shouldn’t be saying that,” Inabinet mentioned.
Moreover, he indicated that the dignity of the stays of the enslaved folks on the cemetery ought to have taken priority when the work was carried out.
“If was to reply from an instructional standpoint, I’d say, ‘To know the family tree, discover the historical past of this space,’ nevertheless it issues a lot extra that their dignity is restored.”
In response to WYFF Information 4, in 2024, Greenville County initially claimed that it owned the land the cemetery sits on, and thereby would take the lead on cleanup. Nevertheless, officers have since modified their tune, and apparently neither they, nor the Greenville County Redevelopment Authority owns the land that incorporates the cemetery.
Per WYFF’s reporting, the land continues to be listed because the property of an 1800s church group, Society Floor, and in the identical property report, it additionally denotes the land as “county possession,” which county leaders are saying is the results of a clerical error.
In consequence, no one actually is aware of who needs to be in charge of the land, and thus chargeable for the cleanup effort.
Regardless of this convoluted mess, each Walter Patton of the Upstate Cemetery Preservation Alliance, and Robin Coon, a cemeterian who studied each Brutontown Society Floor Cemetery and Walcott Cemetery in 2024, say that the way in which the cleanup was approached was improper, becoming a member of the criticism of Professor Inabinet.
“We aren’t happy with the way in which that it has been cleaned. There are monitor marks all around the cemetery. You possibly can see the place the automobile or no matter it was. The machine drove over the identical place repeatedly,” Patton instructed the outlet.
Greenville County Councilman Alan Mitchell, who has spent a substantial period of time making an attempt to untangle the query of who owns the cemetery, additionally famous in his feedback that the tools the seller chosen by Greenville County seems to be improper contemplating the duty.
“I used to be a little bit disturbed as a result of the tools that was getting used was heavier than I anticipated,” Mitchell famous.
In response to the Middle for Constitutional Rights, the ordeal in Greenville County, in addition to at different enslaved burial websites within the South, the therapy of Black cemeteries constitutes a violation of the Thirteenth Modification.
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