Jul 14, 2014 2 min read

As we mark the 50th anniversaries of the Civil Rights Act and Freedom Summer in Mississippi this year, it’s worth recalling that segregation and discrimination were not limited to the Jim Crow South.

A story in the Sunday edition of the Observer-Reporter by Barbara Miller shed light on cemeteries in our area that separated those who were interred in them by race. Many of the burial grounds that were set aside for African-Americans have since become overgrown and dilapidated. One cemetery, in Chartiers Township, has been cleaned up in recent years, but it still contains many graves that are unmarked, the identities of their occupants now unknown.

U.S. Sen. Bob Casey has called on the Veterans Affairs Department to establish a public database that, at the very least, would offer some guidance on where black Civil War veterans are buried. They were often laid to rest in different locations than their white peers, some of these spots dubbed “Lincoln Colored Cemeteries” or “Freedmen’s Cemeteries.” In a letter to the department, Casey pointed out that “many of these cemeteries are in poor condition or even lost.”

Creating such a database would be a means of extending an overdue honor to these soldiers and not letting their stories slip into obscurity.