At Clemson, unmarked slave graves highlight plantation past [View all]

CLEMSON, S.C. (AP) — On the sloping side of a cemetery on the campus of Clemson University, dozens of small white flags with pink ribbons have replaced the beer cans that once littered a hill where football fans held tailgate parties outside Memorial Stadium.

The flags are a recent addition, marking the final resting places of the enslaved and convicted African American laborers who built the school, and before that, the plantation on which it sits. Hundreds more of the flags are dotted among existing gravestones, and until lately, most visitors stepped unknowingly over their remains.

“Cemetery Hill” has served as the final resting place for some of Clemson’s faculty and trustees for nearly a century. Now, researchers have identified more than 600 previously unmarked African American graves, some overbuilt by the marked graves of white people, dating back to the early 1800s.

The revelation has prompted Clemson to reconsider the Woodland Cemetery’s function on campus amid a national reckoning by universities to properly acknowledge their legacies of slavery and forced labor.

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