‘You Can Feel the Sprits’: Historic Black Cemetery Rediscovered and Helps Tell the Story of a Georgia Town’s Racist Past

For more than 150-years, 170 Black people, some believed to be enslaved, were laid to rest without hardly anyone noticing. The Tolbert Street cemetery is off the beaten path, nestled near a wooded area in Cumming, Georgia, about 40-miles north of Atlanta. The small cemetery is less than an acre, but it’s filled with only a handful of headstones and countless other quartz and other stones marking the head and food of the 170 graves.