No sign commemorates a place in Richmond where 20,000 Black people were buried. Lenora McQueen wants to change that.

She knew freed and enslaved Black cemeteries aren’t usually well-maintained, but she expected to find some evidence of its past; perhaps a few headstones or grave shaft depressions in the ground.

“What I saw threw me,” said McQueen, who had traveled more than 1,500 miles from her home in Texas to find this burial ground on North Fifth Street.

An abandoned, graffiti-covered auto service station and a set of billboards overlooking Interstate 64 are the only landmarks for the Shockoe Hill African Burial Ground, the former public cemetery where McQueen’s ancestor, Kitty Cary, is buried. It’s also called the Second African Burial Ground.

Gravestones in the walled Shockoe Hill and Hebrew cemeteries across the street are still part of the landscape and recognized in the National Register of Historic Places, but the city systematically erased the segregated resting place where historians estimate that more than 20,000 freed and enslaved Black people were buried.

McQueen and a team of archaeologists and historians say its long past time for the city to respect and memorialize the burial ground stretched across a constellation of public and privately held property — especially as state and federal officials evaluate the area for highway and rail expansion projects that Preservation Virginia, a privately run group, recently deemed a threat to the burial ground in its annual listing of the state’s most endangered historic places.

Hoping to help preserve the cemetery and begin the process of creating a memorial there, McQueen and other researchers filed preliminary paperwork last year to include the Second African Burial Ground on the national register.

At the same time, the city, which also is working with community partners to build a slave heritage museum and memorial site about 1.5 miles away in Shockoe Bottom, recently bought an acre of the original Second African Burial Ground site for $145,000 in a tax auction.

City officials said they intend to reclaim the space and create a memorial there. The city has not developed specific plans yet, but an ordinance the City Council approved last year directs the mayor’s administration to make plans for its inclusion in the Richmond Slave Trail.

A city news release last month said Mayor Levar Stoney’s administration plans to contract a cultural resources firm to perform further research and an archaeological investigation of the site to help determine how the city should memorialize the history of the cemetery.

“This important acquisition is yet another step in our efforts to reclaim the hidden and abandoned history of the African-Americans who built this city,” Stoney said. “If we are to truly reconcile the shameful history of slavery and injustice and heal as a city and a nation, we must respect and honor the memories of those who lived and died under this oppression by telling their stories so they will not be forgotten.”

Historical Black cemeteries tend to disappear over time, McQueen said. “That doesn’t mean they’re still not there. They just lie beneath.”

While city officials are now turning their attention to the reclamation of historical African American burial grounds, Ana Edwards, a local public historian who has worked with McQueen, said past city officials systemically took part in their destruction while preserving and caring for historical cemeteries where white residents and Confederate soldiers were buried.

“Municipal cemeteries are always going to suffer at the whim of city leadership and what they decide is the best use of the property,” she said. “Because Black lives, property and civic space was not valued ... it’s obviously not unusual that they closed the cemetery and decided to repurpose the site.”

Richmond established the cemetery in 1816 on 2 acres along what is now Fifth Street, splitting them into two distinct sections for freed and enslaved Black people. Ryan K. Smith, a VCU history professor and expert on local cemeteries, said local Black residents demanded that the city create the new burial ground because of the poor condition of the city’s first Black burial ground in Shockoe Bottom.

It remained the city’s primary public cemetery for Black people through most of the 19th century, expanding across an estimated swath of 31 acres. Officials recorded the last burial there in 1879 after they determined that it had become overcrowded and unable to hold any more burials.

Smith said grave robbers plundered human remains from the cemetery and sold them to doctors at the Medical College of Virginia and other teaching hospitals while it was still actively used for burials.

And as the city grew and developed in the post-Civil War years, city engineers used bones and remains from the graves as fill when new roads were built through the burial ground. Progress continued to scar the landscape of the cemetery, rendering it unrecognizable by the early 20th century. After decades of neglect and maltreatment, the city sold part of the property to Sun Oil Co. in 1960 without acknowledging the history of the cemetery, Smith said.

Edwards said the First African Burial Ground in Shockoe Bottom, which the city opened in the late 18th century, suffered a similar fate. The city largely neglected the site for two centuries until she and other local residents started advocating for its reclamation. Their work has resulted in tentative plans for a memorial campus that includes the First African Burial Ground, Lumpkin’s Slave Jail and neighboring parcels of former auction houses that constituted the nation’s second-largest slave trading hub for several decades before the Civil War.

Smith said historical records show that the city maintained both sections of the segregated Shockoe Hill cemetery when it was still actively being used. He said it’s unsurprising that the city would abandon and build over the Black portion of the cemetery given that city leaders sought to cultivate a heritage and historical narrative that excluded the memories of Black residents.

“In the 1870s, [cemeteries with Confederate graves] like Hebrew, Hollywood and Oakwood start to see a real drive to care for those graves, to preserve and maintain them in the public memory,” he said. “And then Monument Avenue gets laid out in the 1890s and going forward. It’s during those same exact years that African American sites like [the Second African Burial Ground] are ... erased from public maps.”

Smith and McQueen said there are newspaper accounts from the period that show Black community members, such as Richmond Planet Editor John Mitchell Jr., protested the desecration of the site. City officials, however, largely ignored them.

In a recent journal article, Smith quoted Mitchell from a 1896 Richmond Planet article where he shamed “people who profited by the desecration of the burial ground on Poor-house Hill, North 5th Street when graves were dug into, bones scattered, coffins exposed, and the hearts of the surviving families made to bleed by the desecration of the remains of their loved ones.”

As part of the DC2RVA high-speed rail project, the state is considering plans to construct new rails that historians and preservationists say would disturb the burial grounds. State officials previously determined that the project would not have an adverse impact on the cemetery site, but McQueen and others objected, saying that they did not do enough historical research.

State and federal officials last month reopened a historical evaluation process to determine whether the project may negatively impact the site.

“It’s a nuanced situation, because the exact boundaries of what remains of that cemetery are unknown,” said Julie Langan, director of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “It’s hard to know how much of that cemetery actually still survives because of all of the projects and mistreatment of it over decades. We know that it has been adversely impacted by ... multiple projects. What we don’t know is what is the integrity of what’s left.”

While inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places would not prevent the rail project, it would require state and federal officials to give the site greater consideration and negotiate terms to mitigate the impact the project would have on the site.

As officials and community members are starting to think of how to commemorate the site, McQueen said one concept she’s thought of is a sculpture wall or statues that would bring to life the scenes of two funeral processions that Frederick Law Olmsted, a park designer known as the founder of American landscape architecture, witnessed in 1853. In his account of them, he described what people were wearing, a carriage carrying a casket and riding horses that were part of the procession.

It could be a way to honor and respect the lives of people the city mistreated and tried to forget, she said.