Company agrees to remove billboards from historic Black cemetery
An advertising company has agreed to settle a lawsuit by removing three billboard towers that have stood for years in a historic Black cemetery along Interstate 70 in St. Louis, according to the woman who sued.
Community activist Wanda Brandon, 60, of St. Louis, filed the civil suit against Drury Display Inc. Media in April of 2019 in St. Louis County Court. Her mother and other relatives are buried in Washington Park Cemetery.
“I feel great,” she said in an interview Monday. “That’s what I want. I want them gone. After all the fighting and back and forth, they’ve finally decided to leave.”
Brandon has long been an advocate for cleaning up and preserving the rundown cemetery with missing and broken tombstones. Last year, she formed the Washington Park Cemetery Anti-Desecration League.
Interstate 70 was built through a section of the cemetery that officials in the 1950s said weren’t used for burials. Forty years later, thousands of graves were moved to make way for MetroLink. Today, three towers for six billboards stand next to tombstones.
Drury apparently bought a strip of land along Interstate 70 years ago and erected the towers, although no advertising has been displayed in recent months, Brandon said.
“(The billboards) don’t belong there,” she said. “They’re disrespectful. They disrupt the sanctity of the cemetery. Cemeteries are not for commercialization. That’s not the purpose.”
Brandon argues that Black cemeteries have always been treated with less respect than white cemeteries.
“At least once a month, a different story pops up from somewhere in the United States about a Black cemetery that has been erased or desecrated in some way,” she said last fall, weighing in on issues surrounding another black cemetery in Illinois.
The Illinois Department of Transportation discovered apparent human bones at the former site of Douglas-Lawnridge Cemetery in Washington Park, Illinois, in November while preparing to replace the Kingshighway interchange for Interstate 64.
The cemetery, which served Black families from throughout the region until the 1940s, was supposed to be moved in the 1960s to make way for construction of Interstate 64.
The discovery of bones at the former cemetery site set in motion a legal process required by the Illinois Human Skeletal Remains Protection Act. Officials said it could lead to overpass-project design changes or relocation of some remains.
The discovery also led some local residents to call for IDOT to erect a monument of some kind.
“I just want some recognition for it,” said Washington Park resident Malissa Blanchard. “I want the public to know that the cemetery existed. I want the people who are buried there to be remembered and not forgotten.”
The settlement in Brandon’s lawsuit was finalized Thursday by her attorney, Mary Coffey, of the Coffey & Nichols law firm in St. Louis.
Drury Display Inc. Media has agreed to permanently remove the six billboards in Washington Park Cemetery, according to a press release from Brandon.
“The entire structures are to be extracted at ground level with little disturbances to graves by December 8, 2020, or before,” the release stated. “The extraction process is to occur under the observance of a designee of the St. Louis County Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.”
This story was originally published July 13, 2020 at 1:50 PM.
