South-View Cemetery

The Oldest Black Stockholder Corporation in the U.S.

The funeral service of noted civil rights activist and Congressman John Lewis, who was interred at South-View Cemetery.

After the official end of slavery, racial discrimination did not cease, and blacks throughout the United States suffered the experience in various forms, not least segregation. In 1880s Georgia, formerly enslaved blacks in Atlanta had been pushed beyond their limit when segregation extended to the burial of their dead. Blacks living in the South wanted to retain dignity in their funerary services. 

They had already been forced to erect schools and educate their children, and they built hospitals and established training schools to supply skilled medical personnel to care for the sick. Black businesses also sprang up in service to various communities. As a natural extension of these developments, a fitting resting place was desired to allow for closure denied to black people living in these communities.

For Atlanta blacks, burying loved ones in this period meant entering select cemeteries via a back gate to avoid contact with whites, or worse, being restricted to services conducted in swamps, through which families would have to wade. A group of prominent black men in the community held meetings in the basement of Atlanta-based Friendship Baptist Church in 1885 for a proposed solution to the problem of lack of adequate burial. As a result of the meetings, they sought to obtain a charter from the State of Georgia via petition in February 1886. Despite racial oppression, South-View Cemetery was chartered as a joint-stock holding corporation in Atlanta on April 21, 1886, without regard to race. In her book, South-View: An African American City of the Dead, historian Dr. D.L. Henderson writes:

“A small number of the nation’s present-day African American businesses were also founded in the late 1880s, though none were originally incorporated.”

A view toward the Atlanta skyline overlooking South-View Cemetery’s manicured grounds. Photo courtesy of the South-View Cemetery Association.

Thus, on April 21, 1886, history was made, as South-View Cemetery became the oldest black stockholder corporation in the U.S. The charter was signed by six former slaves who rose to become successful and well-respected businessmen. They were: Jacob McKinley, George W. Graham, Charles H. Morgan, John D. Render, Robert Grant, and Albert Watts, who served as the association’s first treasurer, and whose family continued to administer its operation into the present day. 

Nestled between downtown Atlanta and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, South-View Cemetery, which started as only 25 acres, now sits in the historic Lakewood Heights neighborhood on over 100 acres of rolling hills and flat plateaus. More than 80,000 black Americans are buried on its grounds, which feature a naturalistic landscape design inspired by nineteenth-century British garden cemeteries. South-View offered more than just dignified internment of the dearly departed, however. The inviting landscape also provided a desirable green open space within a bustling city environment that was becoming increasingly busy and growing more crowded as the years passed.

While the cemetery garnered support from the beginning, over time, many more have come to see the importance of the cemetery, and the burial of notable black leaders as well as individuals who have figured prominently in black history via their struggles and contributions have only added to South-View’s continuing legacy.

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This article appears in 45 People, Places, and Events in Black History You Should Know.

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