The Highway Over the Graves

In 1990, construction crews were widening North Central Expressway through Dallas when their equipment struck something unexpected: human bones. Then more bones. Then coffins, grave goods, buttons, jewelry. The workers had dug into a cemetery — one that Dallas had forgotten existed, one that the city had been driving over for decades. The dead, it turned out, had been there all along.

Freedman's Cemetery was established in 1869, four years after the end of the Civil War, as a burial ground for formerly enslaved people and their descendants. For thirty years, it served as the only cemetery in Dallas where Black residents could bury their dead. Thousands of people were interred there — freedmen who had survived slavery, their children born into freedom, the founders of Black Dallas. Then the cemetery closed, the markers deteriorated, and the city built roads over the graves. By 1990, nobody remembered they were there.

What happened next forced Dallas to confront a history it had literally paved over. The excavation of Freedman's Cemetery became one of the largest archaeological projects in Texas history — and revealed a community that Dallas had erased from memory.

The Freedmen's Town

After Emancipation, formerly enslaved people across Texas faced an immediate problem: where to go. Many had been property their entire lives, with no land, no money, no legal identity. They gathered in camps and settlements near the towns where they'd been enslaved, trying to build new lives from nothing.

In Dallas, that settlement became Freedman's Town — a community of several hundred formerly enslaved people just north of downtown. They built churches, started businesses, established schools. They created a functioning community within a city that wanted nothing to do with them. And when they died, they needed somewhere to bury their dead.

White cemeteries wouldn't accept Black bodies. The city wouldn't provide public burial grounds for Black residents. So in 1869, the city designated a four-acre plot of land on the northern edge of Freedman's Town as a cemetery for "colored" residents. It wasn't generosity — it was segregation extending beyond death. But it was all Black Dallas had.

"We must tell the story of Freedman's Town. We must honor these ancestors. We cannot let them be forgotten again."

— Mamie McKnight, Historian and preservationist who saved the cemetery

The Burials

The cemetery operated from 1869 to 1907, accepting burials for nearly four decades. During that time, over 5,000 people were interred there — a staggering number for a four-acre plot. Some had been born into slavery; others were the first generation born free. Some died as children; others lived into old age. The cemetery held the entire first generation of free Black Dallas.

Burial practices reflected African American traditions that had survived slavery. Graves were often decorated with personal items: broken pottery, bottles, shells, coins. Some graves were oriented east-west, so the dead would rise facing the sun on Judgment Day. The practices varied by family and church, but they carried meaning that connected the freedmen to their ancestors and their faith.

The graves also reflected the harsh realities of post-slavery life. Infant mortality was staggeringly high — many of the burials were children who died before their first birthday. Maternal mortality claimed young mothers. Violence and accidents took men in their prime. The bones would later tell stories of hard labor, poor nutrition, and lives cut short.

Wooden markers rotted in the Texas heat. Stone markers were expensive and rare. Within years of burial, many graves became unmarked. The families remembered, but the physical traces faded. When the cemetery closed in 1907, replaced by a new burial ground farther from downtown, Freedman's Cemetery was already disappearing.

The Erasure

After the cemetery closed in 1907, Dallas began erasing it from existence. The land was sold. Buildings went up. Roads were cut through. By the 1920s, the cemetery had vanished from city maps. The graves remained, but nothing marked them. Dallas had literally paved over its Black dead.

The erasure was systematic. City records were incomplete or lost. Property deeds made no mention of the cemetery. When North Central Expressway was built through the area in the 1940s, construction crews almost certainly disturbed graves — but there's no documentation of what they found or what they did with the remains. The dead were simply obstacles to progress.

For decades, thousands of Dallas residents drove over Freedman's Cemetery without knowing it. The freeway carried commuters north to the suburbs, their cars passing over the bones of the people who had built the city's first Black community. The irony was brutal: the descendants of the freedmen fled to those suburbs to escape the segregated city their ancestors had built, driving over their ancestors' graves to get there.

For decades, thousands of Dallas residents drove over Freedman's Cemetery without knowing it. The freeway carried commuters north to the suburbs, their cars passing over the bones of the people who had built the city's first Black community. The irony was brutal: the descendants of the freedmen fled to those suburbs to escape the segregated city their ancestors had built, driving over their ancestors' graves to get there.

"We didn't know. My grandmother grew up in Freedman's Town, and even she didn't know the cemetery was still there. The city made it disappear. They buried the past under concrete and hoped nobody would remember."

— Dallas resident, Interview, 1991

The Discovery

In 1990, the Texas Department of Transportation began widening North Central Expressway. Engineers knew, vaguely, that there might be old graves in the construction zone — some historical records mentioned a "Negro cemetery" in the area. But nobody expected what they found.

When excavation began, bodies appeared almost immediately. Then more bodies. Then it became clear that the construction was cutting through the heart of an enormous cemetery that the city had forgotten. Work stopped. Archaeologists were called in. What started as a highway project became one of the largest archaeological excavations in Texas history.

The excavation took over two years. Archaeologists carefully exhumed 1,157 burials from the construction zone — adults, children, infants, each one photographed and documented before removal. They found coffin hardware, buttons, coins, and jewelry. They found grave goods that spoke to African American burial traditions. They found the physical remains of people who had been enslaved, freed, and then forgotten.

The bones told stories. Skeletal analysis revealed patterns of hard labor — arthritis, joint damage, muscular stress markers from a lifetime of physical work. Some showed signs of violence or injury. Many showed evidence of childhood malnutrition. These were people who had survived slavery only to face lives of grinding poverty in a city that didn't want them.

The Reckoning

The discovery of Freedman's Cemetery forced Dallas to acknowledge what it had done. For generations, the city had erased the burial ground of its founding Black community — paved over their graves, driven over their bones, and forgotten they existed. The excavation made that erasure impossible to ignore.

Community reaction was intense. Black Dallas residents, many of whom had ancestors buried in Freedman's Cemetery, demanded respect for the dead. Activists pushed for proper commemoration. Politicians, caught between development pressures and public outrage, scrambled to respond.

The reburial took place in 1994. The 1,157 exhumed individuals were reinterred in a new memorial cemetery adjacent to the original site. A memorial was built — a modest but dignified space honoring the freedmen and their descendants. The highway was completed, but the dead had finally been acknowledged.

The archaeological collection became a major research resource. Analysis of the remains provided unprecedented insight into the lives of formerly enslaved people in post-Civil War Texas — their health, their work, their deaths. The Freedman's Cemetery Project produced studies that continue to inform our understanding of Reconstruction-era African American communities.

What Remains

Today, the Freedman's Cemetery Memorial sits at the corner of North Central Expressway and Lemmon Avenue, a small green space amid the concrete. Bronze statues depict a freedman and his wife, looking toward the future. Interpretive panels tell the story of the cemetery and its people. Most drivers pass without noticing.

The original four-acre cemetery extended well beyond the memorial's boundaries. Underneath the roads and parking lots, underneath the apartment buildings and offices that have risen since, thousands of burials likely remain undisturbed. Every building project in the area risks encountering them. Dallas has never conducted a comprehensive survey to determine how many graves are left.

Freedman's Town itself is gone. Urban renewal and highway construction destroyed the neighborhood over the course of the twentieth century. The community that the freedmen built — their churches, their businesses, their homes — was demolished to make way for the New Dallas. Only the cemetery remains, a trace of a community that Dallas worked hard to forget.

Freedman's Cemetery held the first generation of free Black Dallas — men and women who had been property, who had survived the worst thing one person can do to another, who had built families and communities and lives in a city that never wanted them. When they died, they were buried in the only ground the city would give them.

Then Dallas forgot them. The city paved roads over their graves, built buildings on their bones, and erased them from history. For decades, commuters drove over the cemetery without knowing it. The freedmen lay there, unmarked and unremembered, while the city that they helped build forgot they ever existed.

The 1990 excavation changed that — but only partially. Dallas acknowledged the cemetery. The dead were reburied with dignity. A memorial was built. But thousands of graves remain under the concrete. The city still drives over its dead. Some erasures are too complete to fully undo.