Greenwood Cemetery is located at 6571 St. Louis Avenue in Hillsdale Missouri.

Greenwood Cemetery is 31.25 acres lying within the municipality of Hillsdale and bordered by Velda City and Velda Village Hills. Founded in 1874, Greenwood Cemetery is the oldest non-sectarian cemetery for African Americans in St. Louis County. It is the final resting place of 30,000 African Americans; including an aid to Abraham Lincoln; civil rights leader Charlton Tandy; promoter and restauranteur Jesse Johnson; veterans of the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War; and many great blues musicians, businessmen and educators.

The friends of Greenwood Cemetery Association, Inc. plans to operate Greenwood Cemetery as a memorial park, closed to new burials, with hiking trails, picnic areas, and restored historic tombstones. The Friends of Greenwood Cemetery will nominate the cemetery to the National Register of Historic Places and will publish maps and brochures to disseminate the history of the cemetery and those buried within it.

The Friends of Greenwood Cemetery Association, Inc. will establish an endowment to provide for the long-term care and maintenance of Greenwood Cemetery.

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Photos of Greenwood Cemetery

Entrance to Greenwood Cemetery

History Behind The Greenwood Logo:

The "X" symbol found on the bottom of Colonoware bowls (South Carolina & Georgia, Chesapeake Bay area, and the Caribbean) has been interpreted by archaeoligist Leland Ferguson of the University of South Carolina as a Bakongo Cosmogram. A cosmogram is a symbol that represents a group or a person's worldview. THis interpretation was based on the work of art historian R.F. Thompson at Yale. "The Bakongo people are anumerous and powerful people located in the southern portion of modern Zaire near the Angolan border" (Ferguson 1992:114). Historically during the slave trade, this region was known as the "Congo-Angolan region." The Bakongo Cosmogram is a cross with a circle around it. The cross likely has connections to more contemporary crossroads interpretations and the "circle" refers to the cycles of life and death. Overall, the meaning behind this cosmogram can be best explained by the following quote:

"Bakongo philosophers explain the earth, the land of living, as a mountain over a water barrier separating this world from the land of the dead beneath. Each day the sun rises over the earth and proceeds in a counterclockwise direction, as viewed from the southern hemisphere, across the sky to set in the water. Then, during the earthly nighttime, the sun illuminates the underside of the universe, the land of the dead, until it rises again in the northeast. The cycle continues incessantly, representing the continuity of life: birth, death and rebirth. (Ferguson 1992: 114-115)"

The heart shaped symbol is a stylized form of a Sankofa symbol used by the Akan people and is associated with spirituality and ancestor veneration. This symbol was found outlined in tacks atop a burial coffin at the African Burial Ground excavations in Manhattan - New York, whish was recorded in 1990...