Anna Wyche News Today

Family hosts funeral 100 years after Black cemetery erased

TAMPA — Anna Rebecca Wyche was a freed enslaved woman, mother, cook and businesswoman.

For seven decades, Robles Park Village has covered up Tampa’s first burial ground for black people. Concrete slabs became the barrier between the living and the dead there. But in 2019, Zion Cemetery was rediscovered.

The grounds on which Jeraldine Williams walks are as hallowed as the words she wrote for the woman buried beneath them.