A funeral for the forgotten
By NADIA PFLAUM
On Saturday afternoon, a handful of people showed up to pay tribute to an estimated 3,000 indigent people buried in the historical Leeds Cemetery at 6900 Coalmine Road, now a Kansas City Police Department shooting range.
Pictured are Audreay McKinnie and Corrine Patterson, founding members of the Midwest Afro-American Genealogical Interest Coalition (MAGIC) who arranged for the ceremony. MAGIC was founded in 1991 to help local African-Americans trace their roots; their meetings are open to the public and held the first Saturday of each month at noon at the Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center, 3700 Blue Parkway.
The Leeds site was home to a municipal jail and a tuberculosis hospital in the early 1900s. Prisoners, the poor and victims of an influenza epidemic that hit Kansas City in 1918 were buried here, in what was then known as the municipal cemetery. In this open field, the graves are unmarked. Not a single sign indicates that thousands are buried just a few feet below the surface.
A Kansas City Times story from September 5, 1968, by Bill Ellingsworth described the quality of burial that these unfortunate folks received. “They’d call men from here to dig the graves,” a former municipal jail inmate told Cyriel Provyn, the superintendent of the city’s land in 1968. “…They’d keep the corpses at the old city hospital … get five or six before they’d come out, [we] never just buried one. We’d go out and dig the holes…they’d bring out these boxes, flimsy as the dickens. They were stained red, looked a little like cigar boxes and we’d dig the holes and put them in…Lots of times we buried one on top of another ’cause of the space problem. And there was all kinds … men, women, kids, babies. Normally the guards would pop the lids just to see. I never liked to look, but I always did.”
Former mayor pro-tem Alvin Brooks gave the prayer to open Saturday’s ceremony. Only a fraction of those buried at Leeds are recorded, but there were some death certificates and lists of names out for view on picnic tables, held together in three-ring binders. There was a “white” section and a “black” section, segregated in the records as well as in the field.
“These people never had a funeral, never had nothing,” said Warren Watkins, funeral director of the Watkins Brothers Memorial Chapel. Watkins’ family has been in the funeral business since the early 1900s and has buried the city’s unclaimed bodies for as long. “These people have been here way before we were a twinkle in anybody’s eye,” Watkins said.
