Covington Cemetery

Covington Cemetery officially dates to 1917 when Richard Covington, a successful African American truck farmer and landowner, buried his wife Laura on this plot of land. The Cemetery grew from a private graveyard to a larger sacred space where Black residents living in the Hill section of St. Andrews buried their loved ones. The extended area, known as the St. Andrews Colored Cemetery, covered an extensive wooded area bounded by Lisenby Avenue, 15th Street, Fairland Avenue, and 16th Street., By the 1950s this land became a desirable space for commercial development and most of the Cemetery shifted from communal ownership to private individuals. Mamie Norma Richardson, a descendant of the Covington family astutely had a portion of the Cemetery surveyed and enclosed in 1958. This lot became present-day Covington Cemetery. Richardson, a pioneer African American educator was laid to rest at Covington alongside other early Black teachers., In 1996, the burial ground survived one last attempt to erase its memory when family members of the deceased won a lawsuit to permanently safeguard the Cemetery. The existing headstones commemorate only a portion of those buried at Covington and throughout the adjoining area.