Group fighting to save Love Cemetery in East Texas

SCOTTSVILLE, Texas – Doris Vitatoe paused midway through a cut-over thicket, deep in a pine forest, and nudged a mangled bit of metal with her cowboy boot.

RON BASELICE/DMN

RON BASELICE/DMN

Doris Vitatoe, 67, visits the grave site of her great-grandfather Ohio Taylor. Many of the grave markers have been misplaced.

“That’s a grave marker,” she said. Eyes clouded, she resumed her tussle with chest-high weeds and wisteria. “Nothing left to read. Lord only knows who that is. My grandmother and grandfather – we haven’t been able to find them in here. The metal markers were misplaced. … It’s so many of the little metal plates we can’t find.”

Legal entanglements have kept Ms. Vitatoe and her friends away from Love Cemetery and halted their long struggle to save it. Since March, they’ve been at an impasse over access with a Marshall lumber company that owns the logging road long used to reach the graveyard. So a story of race, place and redemption has been mired in corporate caution, and a black burial ground dating to slavery days is again disappearing beneath a curtain of green.

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