The 1928 Hurricane Mass Grave
Florida
Near the junction of Twenty-Fifth Street and Tamarind Avenue in West Palm Beach, between the interstate and United States Route One, there is a small piece of ground that holds six hundred and seventy-four people. Most of them have no individual marker. Most of them have no individual name recorded anywhere.
They died in the Okeechobee Hurricane of September sixteenth, nineteen twenty-eight. The storm made landfall as a Category Four hurricane with sustained winds of one hundred forty-five miles per hour. It pushed a wall of water across Lake Okeechobee, breaching the earthen dikes that surrounded the southern shore. The lake, Florida's largest, became an inland sea. The water poured out across the farming communities below, catching people in their homes with no warning and no escape.
The death toll has never been precisely established. Official estimates long stood at around two thousand five hundred. More recent research places it closer to three thousand. It was the deadliest hurricane in Florida history and the second deadliest in United States history.
Most of the dead were Black migrant farm workers who had come to the Everglades region to harvest sugarcane and beans. When the bodies were collected in the days that followed, racial segregation governed what happened next. White victims received proper burial at Woodlawn Cemetery with individual coffins and records. Black victims were buried in mass graves, some burned in funeral pyres, others interred in this former pauper's cemetery that the city used for those it considered unworthy of anything better.
The site was largely forgotten for decades, maintained by no one, known by almost no one. A local activist named Robert Hazard worked for years to bring attention to it. The site was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand two. A formal memorial was eventually dedicated here.
Six hundred and seventy-four people are buried in this ground because of a hurricane and because of what their society thought their lives were worth.
