- [Voiceover] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

(dramatic music) - [Rob] Coming up next, we'll catch up with some of our guests from past shows, an educator who was concerned that classrooms were dangerous places because of the spread of COVID, reporters whose discoveries of long-forgotten grave sites have led to searches for more burial sites, statewide, and the ongoing efforts of workers and volunteers at "Feeding Tampa Bay" to help out those who are facing food insecurity.

What are they doing now?

We'll hear from them next on "Florida This Week".

(dramatic music) Welcome back.

A large number of unmarked Black cemeteries have been discovered over the last few years across the Tampa Bay area, and largely because of the work of our next two guests, the grave sites are being found again.

- Ground penetrating radar discovered more than a hundred caskets at the former Zion Cemetery in East Tampa.

Another site, the former College Hill Cemetery is believed to be under a parking lot in Ybor City, near the Italian Club Cemetery.

The city of Clearwater has allocated funds to help discover more Black graves under the Frank Crum building in downtown Clearwater, and more graves have been found under the parking lot of Tropicana Field near the overpass of I-275 in St. Petersburg.

- And joining us now are the two journalists who have been covering these stories over the past few years.

Paul Guzzo is the Culture Reporter for the Tampa Bay Times who first uncovered the lost graves at Zion Cemetery in Tampa and James Borchuck is a multimedia reporter who also covered this story while working at WEDU, and before that, while working at the Tampa Bay Times.

And James and Paul, thanks a lot for joining us.

Great to see you.

- Thank you.

- Thanks.

- So how do cemeteries get lost?

Paul, let me start with you.

How do you lose cemeteries?

- Well, we originally said there were lost.

We've since learned they weren't lost.

Most of them were stolen.

Black communities in the 1800s were formed outside of city limits.

When the cities expanded, they annexed that land and the cemeteries were in the way so they put improvement taxes on the cemeteries, you know, for roads and sewers and lights, and when they couldn't pay, they took the land and gave it to an owner who could pay the taxes.

Once the land was given to a white owner, the city suddenly remembered, "Oh, we're not supposed to tax cemeteries and they didn't have to pay those taxes."

I guess they forgot the law when it was owned by Black residents.

- How many cemeteries in the Tampa Bay area are we talking about, that we know of right now, that were stolen, and now, because of your work and the work of others, have been rediscovered?

- Identified 12.

Six have been confirmed on both sides of the bridge.

- Yeah.

And so what's being done to honor the legacy of those folks?

I mean, in some cases, you can't even tell it's a cemetery any more, right?

- Yeah, they're just open land, parking lots, paved, buildings on top.

You would never know there was a cemetery there unless you either had a shovel or ground-penetrating radar.

- Yeah, so what's being done, James, to honor the legacy of those people that, you know, who were buried there?

- Well, for instance, at Zion, they wanna make a park and have some memorials there.

The state has also created a task force to kind of look into what can be done.

First, they have to confirm these things, and over at Tropicana Field, for instance, they have confirmed, in one of the parking lots, that there is something there.

So next steps, I think, for that particular location is to figure out what's gonna happen with the baseball team and whether or not that area is going to just get memorialized or, you know, what's next and who's gonna pay for it.

- Mm-hmm, well, what's the law on this?

I mean, is it legal to build a building on top of a cemetery?

Is it legal to build a parking lot on top of a cemetery?

- When this happened, it was.

There were no laws in the early 1900s, when this happened, protecting cemeteries.

There was nothing stopping you from just picking up a headstone, throwing it aside and saying, "We don't see a cemetery here."

Today, there are laws, so if you happen to own land that you bought, not knowing there used to be a cemetery there, now you have to abide by the law.

You cannot do anything on that property that could disturb the human remains in the ground, but when this happened, no.

There were no laws protecting anything.

- With the Tropicana one, for example, the then St. Pete Times did a story on the construction workers because they had dug up some bones, and there was an actual photograph of a construction worker with a skull on a shovel, and he was posing for the photographer, and it said in the story that the construction workers were in charge of excavating the graves and moving them to other places.

So, you know, obviously, these guys, that wasn't their job, and they didn't wanna do it, so it didn't end well, but that was kind of the way it was back then.

- Plus, it seems that it should be done by professionals.

- Yeah.

- Not a construction worker.

(chuckles) - Yeah, today you would have to have, once you find remains, everything has to stop and you have to bring in archeologists to oversee the process from there.

- The state task force is called "The Abandoned African-American Cemeteries Task Force", and it's been championed by two local legislators, but I'm wondering that title, "abandoned", is misleading.

- Very.

Now, let me correct something I said before.

Not all of them were stolen.

The one over on King High Campus really does seem like it was forgotten.

- [Rob] This is in the Temple Terrace area?

- Yeah, called Ridgewood.

That one really does seem, too, that the school was built and they just happened to forget there was ever a cemetery over there, but for the most part, no, these were not...

If they were abandoned, they were abandoned after they were stolen.

So Zion was stolen from the Black community, and then, the new owners, you know, they abandoned it and then built on it.

- It was funny with that one though 'cause Rod Carter from Channel 8 found an older woman who remembers when they were building that school.

She told the construction workers, "Hey, there's a cemetery over there," and she walked over and pointed to the graves with one of the workers and said, you know, but they didn't do anything about it either, so yeah.

It is hard to say, though, that they were abandoned.

- Yeah.

- Is anybody keeping a list of the descendants of the folks at these grave sites that are being rediscovered?

Is anybody contacting the families and asking them what they think about the graves of their ancestors being rediscovered?

- USF, they're spearheading that.

There is a man, Drew... - [Paul] Drew Smith.

- Drew Smith, who is using students, and they're trying to do genealogy and finding families who were buried, and they're starting with Zion and seeing, you know, contacting family members and saying, "Hey," you know, and I think they might be... Are they using DNA to try to find that?

- No, they're using paper trails, just genealogical records and they're, yeah, they're doing Zion, and I mean, we've reached out in our reporting when we have found descendants.

We've done some genealogy.

Obviously, I can't do almost a thousand like USF is capable of doing, but we've done some, and tracked them down, and every time you tell them, "I believe you have a family member buried in Zion," or, "You have a family member buried in College Hill," or one of the other ones, or in Port Tampa, their reaction has always been, "Huh?"

And then you read them the name of the person, and they'll say, "No, I never had anybody in my family with that name," and then you would show them the genealogy report and they'd say, "Well, that was a first uncle," or, "That would have been my cousin," and it just, once the cemeteries were erased when they were stolen and erased, the family stopped talking about the people who were buried there and we can never know exactly why, but one theory, historians have mentioned, is how painful it must have been to be so powerless to sit there and watch as they built over your mother's grave, over your grandmother's grave, and it was just easier to never talk about it again than to continue to relive how powerless you were when they just desecrated the grave of somebody who meant so much to you.

- So how did you figure out that this was an issue?

When you first started to report about this, what tipped you off that there might be a serious issue of forgotten graves here in the Tampa Bay area?

- Well, Paul did a story on a guy named Ray Reed who was doing another similar story and he found a cemetery, but he had mentioned Zion Cemetery in our interview and we were kind of like, you know, "You wanna see if we can find it?"

and so we started looking around.

We couldn't really find anything about Zion Cemetery.

Ray couldn't really find anything, and then we went to the Historical Society and did an interview there, and that's when we actually found on a map that this cemetery existed.

Rodney Kite-Powell pulled out this giant- - [Rob] At the History Center?

- [James] Atlas.

Yeah, and he was flipping through 'cause we knew the address.

We just didn't know if it existed, and then he found it and sure enough, it was on the map.

- And it just... We couldn't then just write, "Hey, there was a cemetery here and there could still be bodies there," and so it took us nine months, but what we had to do, we couldn't prove the bodies were there so we had to exhaust every effort to find out if we could find evidence that they were moved and that included taking the list of everybody.

We went through the death records and pulled every death record for Zion Cemetery, and then we actually had a list and we would put those names into other cemetery databases and then actually walked Memorial Park Cemetery, which was the oldest Black cemetery that still exists to look for them, and once we couldn't find records of them moved anywhere, headstones, or any sort of newspaper article saying, "Okay, an entire cemetery was moved," you know, we ran the story and once it ran, the phone started ringing.

You know, people had been saying that they believed there was a cemetery on MacDill Air Force Base for years.

People have been saying they thought the Italian Club's parking lot used to be a cemetery for Blacks and Cubans for years.

Clearwater Heights, they've been saying, for years, "Our cemetery was destroyed," but nobody took 'em seriously, and once our story on Zion came out and once the archeologists went and they found the graves with ground-penetrating radar, that kind of gave everybody the courage to step forward and say, "Everybody for years has been saying, we're making this up, and now you see it's possible," and each person has stepped forward.

It's been proven.

- Well, Paul Guzzo and James Borchuck, thank you very much for coming on "Florida This Week" and it's important work that you're doing.

Thank you for doing it.

- Thanks for having us.

- Thank you.

(gentle music) - [Rob] Last July, school districts across Florida were getting ready to reopen brick-and-mortar classes after a year of online learning.

Governor DeSantis threatened to withhold funding from any districts that did not physically reopen.

Dr. Christie Faust was a Pinellas County High School science teacher who preferred a delay in the brick-and-mortar reopening while Florida was in the midst of that COVID spike in the middle of the summer of last year.

She joins us again now, and Dr. Christy Faust, thanks for returning to "Florida This Week".

Nice to see you.

- Yeah, thank you so much for having me, and face to face this year.

A little safer.

- Yeah, it's good to see you rather than Skype.

So when we talked, you were very concerned about the safety of the classroom for the students and for the faculty.

You told, I think the Tampa Bay Times, "I'm really worried we're going to be going to funerals of our students and our colleagues."

Did that turn out to be true, your fears about the danger of returning to the classroom?

- I will admit that I can't completely speak to that because I ended up taking a leave of absence because I felt it was going to be unsafe, that my own health and safety was being put on the line, as well as me interacting with my students, and I didn't wanna be accountable for making them sick, as being a center person in a school, right, where a bunch of students are coming to me?

And I will admit, after I began my leave of absence, I wasn't tracking those numbers as much, but just, you know, through my grapevine, you know, I know a number of teachers that ended up getting COVID and just hearing teachers talk about a student would mention that they were infected and hadn't gone through the proper sorts of procedures and things like that, so folks were coming to school sick and things, so it's anecdotal, but I feel like, personally, that the stuff I was hearing once I was out of the classroom wasn't safe.

- Now that the teachers and the students have returned to the classroom for more than a year, do you think that the school system is doing everything it can to keep everybody safe?

- Still, no.

You know, again, just hearing what I've heard through teacher friends, and also what's been in the news, it's an aerosol.

Like, you know, COVID is an aerosol, and when I... One of the things that sparked me wanting to leave was they were putting up plexiglass, little, flimsy, plexiglass, while I was in the classroom.

Like, one of them just broke, like, as the workers were putting them up and things so...

But as a scientist, and a scientist with more of a background in biology, like, it just didn't make sense.

We're talking about something.

Plexiglass is not...

It's going into the air, right?

Like, a plexiglass might help the person directly next, but everyone behind you so, to me, that's just one example.

There were other sorts of safety measures that were put in place, just with my common knowledge, coupled with, you know, the more I know through my educational background, it seemed very performative that it, very much, was like they were trying to do something to look like they were trying to be helpful, and it was really methods that wouldn't really keep people safe.

- You left the teaching profession.

Your specialty was biology and chemistry.

That's what you taught for a time in Hillsborough County, and for a time in Pinellas County.

We want STEM teachers in schools, so how do we make sure that STEM teachers don't leave the profession?

We've got this teacher shortage.

How do we make sure that we hold onto our STEM teachers and attract even more to come to the classroom?

- I don't completely have an answer to that, even, but I will say that I find it very frustrating to hear superintendents say, "Oh, we value STEM.

You know, we want STEM teachers," and the same from the school board that they value, you know, experts in the field and things like that, and then, when you see the practical application of science that you have a school board who basically supports anti-masking, and that you have a superintendent that has supported kids and teachers not wearing masks in school, that goes against science, so I'm supposed to go in as a teacher and feel valued and teaching all of the curriculum that I teach, while again, you know, when you actually use science, now they're saying, "Oh, none of that matters," right?

It's this mixed message, so that's part of it.

Supporting teacher and supporting science.

You say you want these things.

Well, support that.

Some of that answer goes way beyond that, but I just think that's a slap in the face to be like, "We value STEM," but when it comes to using the scientific process and practice, they are not using it to guide their own policy.

- So are you saying that that the Pinellas school system is not aggressive enough in terms of supporting science or when you say the school board and the school superintendent, who are you referring to?

- Most of the school board has not support...

They haven't passed a mask mandate and- - So we're talking about Pinellas County.

- Pinellas County, that's my most recent, but in Hillsborough too, I believe, the same has been true.

- So there's- - And part of that is pressure from Tallahassee.

- Oh, sure, sure.

My response to that would be there's unjust laws, you know, that not everything...

Sometimes, it's worth standing up for what's right, and I haven't seen that happen where folks putting the safety of the community and of students and of the workers of the school, that's standing up for what's right, and standing against what is coming down from Tallahassee.

- So Dr. Faust, thanks a lot and I'm glad you're healthy and good to see you.

- Yeah, thank you so much.

(gentle music) (graphics whoosh) - "Feeding Tampa Bay" fights food insecurity year round.

This month, they've opened food bodegas.

They are small grocery stores where families can choose items to help them get through the holidays.

Shannon Oliviero is with "Feeding Tampa Bay" and joins us now to tell us about the past year and what you can do to help out.

Shannon, good to see you.

- Good to see you again, as well.

- So how many people are food insecure right now in the Tampa Bay area?

You serve a 10-county area, 4.4 million people.

Of those people, how many are food insecure?

- Right now, just about under a million so that's up from prior pandemic.

We had about 650,000, at the peak was 1.7 million, and just under a million today.

- That number seems awfully high, though.

It's more than 20% of the population.

Why is it so high?

We have a low unemployment rate, a relatively low unemployment rate.

Why is it so big?

- Well, we do know that people, although they're working, they're really struggling to make ends meet.

If you think about when you go to the grocery store or you go to fill up your car with gas, people are just really struggling.

It's hard to get those bills paid and take care of families right now.

They're also still recovering from the pandemic.

If you think about how many people were out of jobs and just had their lives stop dramatically, like all of us did, or most of us did, people are just having a hard time.

It's gonna take a while to recover from everything that we went through in 2020.

- If I could read between the lines, you were saying that a lot of these people are working poor.

They work, but their wages don't let them pay for the food that they need.

- We believe that is the case, yeah.

- That's terrible.

What about children?

Of this, almost 1 million people, how many are children?

- One in four children, one in seven adults are struggling with food insecurity and how we're combating that, as you mentioned, our bodegas.

We have school pantries, 50 in five counties right now, and we hope for that to increase as we go into 2022 and a school pantry is where children can go in with their families to make sure that they can put healthy food on their table, right there in their schools where they go to each and every day.

- So we have a lot of food pantries.

We have a lot of churches and religious groups that are handing out food.

We have other nonprofits that hand out food.

Where does "Feeding Tampa Bay" fit into this?

- We are actually, if you can imagine we're the giant grocery store or hub for food throughout the 10 counties that we serve, so over 450 partners, which you mentioned, are the churches, the nonprofits, most everyone that you know from a charitable aspects gets food from us, whether they come pick it up, whether we deliver it, that's how they get their food, and then they distribute it out.

Those people, during the pandemic, helped us deliver 95 million meals out into the community.

- What other services does "Feeding Tampa Bay" provide?

Are you just simply a food service or do you go beyond that?

- We simply focus on food.

We have, of course, our own programs, our own ways of delivering, plus the partners that we align with to make sure that food gets out there, but we also believe that food is the beginning of the struggle that that individual or family might have so that we do partner with other organizations and refer people to others that do what they do best.

- And how are you supported?

What percent of your money comes from donations from the public?

- I'm not totally sure what percentage comes from the public, but we are a hundred percent funded by the community, so for every dollar, 98% goes to support our mission, and we rely on the giving from corporations, individuals, and from grants that we put out there into the community.

- Shannon, every time Thanksgiving rolls around and the Christmas holiday season rolls around, we folks in the media tend to do programs like this and interviews with people like you.

I wonder what happens in the summertime when we're not doing these kinds of interviews.

Tell us about what the needs are in the summertime.

- Hunger remains the same.

We often say, "Hunger doesn't take a holiday."

We appreciate all the volunteers and the media and those who wanna talk to us during the holidays, but hunger is the same during the holidays, in January, in the summertime.

You know, you can imagine we have one thing in common and that is food, and those that are struggling with food insecurity struggle all year round so those of us that are in hunger relief could use your help, your attention, your volunteering, your gifting year round to help lift those in need.

- And do donations and volunteers tend to drop off after the Thanksgiving/Christmas season?

- A bit, so we could really use people to pay attention and go to our website and check out.

We have a wonderful, easy-to-navigate calendar where you can pick out exactly what it is that calls to your heart, whether that be at the food bank outside and our mobile pantries, or just in the county that you live in.

- And Shannon, what haven't we talked about that you would like to tell us about?

- You know, we believe in food for today, which is our Trinity Cafe program, where we give a warm and healthy meal, food for tomorrow, when you talk about the bodegas, but we didn't talk about food for a lifetime, which is our training program and connecting to services to take care of people.

We believe we wanna lift people towards health and capability and, you know, that's our goal for the future.

You know, it begins with food insecurity, but we really believe that everyone has the opportunity to succeed and be healthy, and that's what "Feeding Tampa Bay" is all about, so we invite everyone to join us., Go to our website, feedingtampabay.org, and find the way that you can align with us and you can serve or give and just learn about us completely.

Our website is very comprehensive and you can understand all about us if you don't know about us already.

- Shannon, thanks a lot and happy holidays to you.

- Happy holidays to you, as well, and thank you so much for having us on.

- And if you wanna help out, you can go to feedingtampabay.org.

Thanks for watching the program.

Please send your comments to us at FTW@wedu.org.

You can both view this and past shows online at wedu.org or on the PBS app, and "Florida This Week" is now available as a podcast.

You can find it on our website or wherever you download your podcasts, and from all of us here at WEDU, happy holidays and have a very merry Christmas.

(dramatic music) - [Voiceover] "Florida This Week" is a production of WEDU who is solely responsible for its content.

(dramatic music)