Recently the tombstones at the historic Tucker’s Town grave site were destroyed, following the results of a radar survey to establish the locations of those buried there. This grave site was part of a substantial community of predominantly free blacks who since 1790 owned and worked hundreds of acres of land in Tucker’s Town stretching from Pink Beach across to Harrington Sound.They were pilots, sailors, fishermen, farmers and artisans, who built their own church, school, and village community and lived there for approximately six generations before many of them were ‘legally’ dispossessed of their land by legislators passing the 1920 Development Company Act in order to create a “Palm Beach of Bermuda” for wealthy Americans.Imagine the reaction of horror from the community if the small military grave site located near the bus stop at Watford Bridge was desecrated and turned into a putting green. Or the larger military grave site, en route to Dockyard, bulldozed to create a golf course.In the mid-1970s we silently watched the land around the Warwick Rubber Tree, known to be the location of a slave grave site, bulldozed and turned into a parking lot.What is it about the way we think that allows us to painstakingly maintain a military grave site, and yet do absolutely nothing when it comes to the protection of a historic slave grave site in Warwick? This is where the legacy of our past continues to play out today, with both blacks and whites conditioned to place less importance on Black Bermudian history.This is verified if we consider the reality that when Tucker’s Point was built approximately ten years ago no one gave a second thought to locating a driving range over the burial place of a free black community of national importance.The removal of the tombstones shows a lack of sensitivity for the descendants, and we have been told that many of them are upset. Though the tombstones were not the original, they were symbolic and, just like the thousands of crosses at the Arlington National Cemetery, it was a grave site and the tombstones met a need for remembrance and prayerfulness. One only had to be present at the annual service every year to see how the folks prayed at those grave sites and touched them reverently.The historic free black community in Tucker’s Town may even be one of the earliest of its kind in the western hemisphere, and its graveyard is all we have left to remember them by. Of the thousands of enslaved African Bermudians buried over 218 years, only two slave grave sites have been identified, one is now a parking lot.Where are the thousands of enslaved people buried? Does anyone care?CURB has learned there are plans at the Department of Planning to install a memorial to those who died. However, this tiny historic graveyard goes way beyond individuals representing Tucker’s Point, National Museum or Marsden. This graveyard is of national importance, but more importantly there are living descendants who remember their relatives buried there. It is part of our African Diaspora Heritage Trail, and as such there should be much greater consultation with regard to its restoration and protection.CURB has written to the planning department to gain more time for an in depth consultative process as to how the grave site should be restored, protected and memorialised. We ask that individuals, historical, environmental, and social justice organisations add their voices to this request for a consultative, and if need be mediated, process to ensure what happens to this historic grave site is acceptable to the entire black community, especially their descendants.Letters/e-mails requesting a further consultative process should be sent to the Director of Planning, Trevor Leach at ttleach@gov.bmIt is not that people purposely go ahead and make decisions that have negative impacts, but we are all inextricably still linked to that past, and this plays out in how we perceive our world and act.We must honour the lives of the extraordinary courageous Black Bermudians who, despite slavery and segregation, managed to create a safe, idyllic and hardworking community.