DALLAS — “You see that? The cross,” said Clarence Glover, a former SMU professor of African American studies, as he walked through Freedman’s Cemetery . He pointed out the layout to David Malcolm McGruder, executive pastor at Friendship-West Baptist Church.

“It is designed so we can come here and have a ceremony, worship,” Glover told him. “We’re going to teach you. Now, it’s time for your generation.”

McGruder said the cemetery shows how history still lives where Dallas’ early Black community rests. He called Freedmen’s “sacred ground.”

“This is the site where African American men and women, after slavery and during Jim Crow, were buried,” Glover said.

The cemetery has been disrupted before—first when the North Central Expressway was built and later lowered. Now, decades later, it f

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