ATTENTION DENTON COUNTY RESIDENTS:

Did you know that racism during the early 20th Century led to the ouster and erasure of an African American freed-persons community in Pilot Point?  This community’s long forgotten and now hidden cemetery remains as the primary evidence of the St John's Community's existence but racism continues to bury its memory to this day. 

Initially a burial site for enslaved Africans who died on the “Old Bonner” plantation in Denton County, St John’s Cemetery was later used by freed persons after the civil war who established their community nearby. In 1918, however, white landowners executed a land deal with fraudulent boundaries that unlawfully incorporated the  cemetery and church. Over the next two decades, burials in St Johns cemetery began to dwindle as the property was included in subsequent sales among white landowners which left the site “landlocked” and inaccessible to the African American community. By the time land boundaries were corrected in the 1960s, St John’s cemetery and the community associated with it had been largely forgotten. Although there is little documented history regarding the community’s sudden disappearance, scholars investigating the fraudulent land sales have noted the upward trend of white supremacist violence in the adjacent Pilot Point and Denton communities during the same time period which subsequently led to the forced removal of a Black Denton community known as Quakertown. Research into the St. John’s community remains ongoing but hindered by a lack of access to the cemetery.

According to County Commissioners, they have spent more than $100,000 in tax payer funds on maintenance of the St John's Cemetery over the last decade (a claim still largely under scrutiny by local activists and researchers who have documented substantial neglect of the site and its unique history). Meanwhile, county commissioners and historical commission staff have refused to engage with emerging research outlining the county's historic role in facilitating the forced removal of the freedpersons who established St Johns. Additionally, they continue to hinder the efforts of activists and researchers working to expose this history. 

SIGN THIS PETITION (Denton County Residents only) to demand that county officials take real, meaningful action to honor the history and lives associated with the St Johns community. If tax payers are funding maintenance of St John's Cemetery, then we demand the county take possession of the long abandoned property thereby makin it public property which should be accessible to the living descendants of those buried therein, the researchers uncovering the truth about the community’s erasure, and the public at large so that we may all have oversight of its care and access to the history recorded within it. 

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Learn more about those buried (and find your ancestors) in St John's Cemetery here.

WANT TO HELP?
- Sign (Denton County Residents Only) and Share this petition!
- Attend Commissioners Court on Tuesday’s at 9 am. 
- Share Info w/ Others.
- Participate in clean up events!
- Join weekly demonstrations on the historic Denton Square (Sundays at 4pm.)