LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Two organizations will unite to honor the lives and read the names of 1,630 free and enslaved Black people buried in unmarked graves at St. Louis Cemetery in Louisville on Feb. 24.
These people were buried between the years 1867-1937.
The unmarked graves are in a field tucked behind the thousands of family plots and boxed in by trees.
“This was a part that was designated for Black Catholics and the first burial started in 1867 in this section,” said Ned Berghausen, a theology teacher at Assumption High School and a deacon at St. Agnes Catholic Community. “And the trees were planted at the very beginning of the cemetery as kind of a visual marker that this was a segregated section. That this was quite, quite literally set off from the White parts of the cemetery.”
In the less than one acre section of the land are thousands of unmarked graves.
“From this part of the hill down the slope to the bottom, and then all the way back up to the top of the hill. It’s about three-quarters of an acre,” Berghausen said.
Soon after the protests in 2020 following the death of Breonna Taylor, Berghausen found an obituary of a Black Catholic woman who led a remarkable life. That discovery led him to her grave site where she was buried with the family that enslaved her. This then led him to uncover more names of people, but their burials are underneath the patchy grass.
“When I first came here, you know, it looks like an undeveloped field, one that’s that’s going to be used later, you know, once the rest of the cemetery fills. But, you know, in those conversations, I discovered, no, in fact, there are already people buried here, in fact, lots of them. They’re just without markers for the most part,” Berghausen said.
That was Jan. 2021. His curiosity focused on the role of the Catholic Church in enslaving people.
“I’m a Catholic with Kentucky roots. I’m a member of the Catholic clergy. I’m a deacon and I discovered in my own history that some of my ancestors who lived in central Kentucky and who were Catholic had enslaved people. That’s not something my family had talked about before.” Berghausen said.
After grappling with this discovery, he felt strongly he needed to take action.
“One of the things I did was I went to the cemetery and went through their burial books to look through and find as many people as I could that were buried in these two sections. And, over the course of 13 months, I found 1630 names,” Berghausen said.
Names forgotten in history but now getting recognized and remembered. The event is Saturday, Feb. 24 starting a 2 p.m. at St. Louis Cemetery. It’s called “Remembrance: Reading Of The Names.” Organizers recommend arriving early to park and walk to the site. There’s limited seating, organizers recommend bringing a chair.