- December 6, 2021 Association
Each fall, the increasingly dark days and end of the liturgical year gives the faithful reason to think about end times and our departed souls and saints. But Associate Cathy Hart has even more reason this year. As secretary of the board of Friends of Father Dickson Cemetery in Crestwood, Missouri, she is celebrating her group’s long-term efforts. Father Dickson Cemetery was recently named to the National Register of Historic Places. As a long-time advocate for this more-than-a-century-old cemetery for black St. Louisans, she takes special pride in this place where several of her relatives are buried.
“Ancestry is important,” she says. “We are who we are because they were who they were. And we make a place in history for the people who come after us. I feel this so strongly. We are the products of our ancestors and the progenitors of our descendants.”
For Cathy, this recognition has been a personal mission. Her great grandparents, Charles and Cornelia St. James, are buried in Father Dickson Cemetery. When she went looking for their graves in the early 1980s, she remembers finding the cemetery overgrown in weeds and littered with piles of trash and old tires. It broke her heart. She remembers saying, “Somebody ought to do something about this.”
“As soon as you say that,” she tells, "God says, ‘I have an idea for you!’” She and her family became members of the Friends of Father Dickson Cemetery organization in 1985.
“Cemeteries are important because they recognize the great and not so great," Cathy says. "All deserve to be honored—the bricklayer, the milk truck driver, the pastor, the one who was lynched. We all have a limited time on earth, and during that time, every one of us contributes something.”
Of special note among the gravesites there is the cemetery’s namesake, abolitionist Father Moses Dickson (not a
Catholic priest). Dickson, as head of the Order of Twelve, had assembled over 42,000 Knights of Liberty, a secret society to mount a slave uprising. Before the final plans were confirmed, the Civil War began, and Dickson and his followers thought it better to leave the battles to the Union Army. After emancipation, some did enlist in the Army.
Also buried in this cemetery is James Milton Turner, the first African American to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Liberia; St. Louis educator Charles Vashon and his mother, Susan; and Henry Lewis, known as “Steamboat,” personal barber to Augustus Busch, Sr. of the Anheuser-Busch beer dynasty.
“We are the products of those before us,” she says. “If we don’t know their stories, we don’t know our own … not fully.” This is especially important for African Americans," she says. "We Black people need to know our stories. Over the centuries, there has been an overt effort to cut us off from our histories, so we don’t feel we belong. This knowledge helps you to understand that you are a part of history.”
Cathy acknowledges it's hard for people to see cemeteries as a priority. “Why put your money, time and energy in a cemetery? Because sometimes we are called to do something greater than what is immediate; sometimes we are called to see and to contribute to the bigger picture," she says.
Cathy sees a spiritual dimension to her work with Father Dickson Cemetery, too. “We say we believe in the communion of saints. But do we live like we believe? Do we call those who have gone before us into our everyday lives? Do we participate in this world like we’re going to be one of them someday? We are still linked to them, still in communion with them.”
That communion deserves recognition and is reason to rejoice throughout the year.
Written by Sister Mary Flick