Advocates are rallying to preserve Black cemeteries from being built over, destroyed, and effectively disrespected. 

Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, president of the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition (BACC), is one of the advocates leading the charge to help safeguard the Maryland-area burial site from additional development and reclaim it for the descendant community. Developers in the area intend to construct other structures, namely businesses, atop the gravesites. 

The Moses Macedonia African Cemetery in Bethesda, Maryland, and another burial ground for enslaved people are located on the roughly two-acre site in the Washington, DC suburb. The oldest portion of the site dates back to the mid-1800s. The remains of enslaved individuals and their descendants may be represented by the hundreds of bones discovered in the area, while additional corpses may be concealed beneath the parking lot of the Westwood Tower apartment complex.

However, its preservation is threatened by the gentrification and encroaching development that have resulted in the loss of its original community, as is the case with many resting grounds for Black Americans. Despite a recent federal law that purports to safeguard Black cemeteries, they are susceptible to neglect and eventual destruction.

On May 28, 2025, BACC members protest near the Moses Macedonia African Cemetery increase awareness of the historic Black burial ground, which is currently under threat of ongoing development and has been paved over by a parking lot. This protest is part of a weekly demonstration that BACC members have enacted for the past several months to impede the progress of the new developments. 

The Housing Opportunities Commission of Montgomery County (HOC), which provides low-income housing, currently owns the portion of the burial ground that was destroyed for Westwood Tower's parking lot in the 1960s, which has been divided into multiple parcels.  

Since the beginning of construction for a storage facility in 2017, ongoing BACC protests have been sparked by a third section, which is owned by the self-storage developer 1784 Capital Holdings, as reported by The Guardian. The burial site has become a legal battleground as the coalition has spent several years in court battling the HOC.

Michael Blakey, a professor of anthropology, Africana studies, and American studies at the College of William and Mary and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, told The Guardian that the ongoing battle "serves to open up the conversation about the significant issue that African Americans are facing at these sites."  

Blakey oversaw the African Burial Ground Project at Howard University for more than a decade, commencing in the 1990s. He and a team of researchers examined more than 400 skeletal remains of enslaved and free Africans who were interred in New York City during the 17th and 18th centuries. 

He added, “The desecration of Black cemeteries is a reflection, whether in slavery or in current development projects … of the lack of empathy with African Americans as complete human beings. And African Americans, from slavery to the present, have defended those cemeteries with sure knowledge of their full humanity and an insistence upon their dignity.”