The Woodlawn Cemetery Perpetual Care Association

From its founding in 1895 until the 1950s, it was the preeminent burial place for African American Washingtonians.

It is  the final resting place of   Blanche K. Bruce, the first first black Senator to serve a full term, educator Roscoe Conkling Bruce, famed abolitionist Wilson Bruce Evans, lawyer, educator and Congressman John Mercer Langston, and composer Will Marion Cook, playwright and educator Mary P. Burrill, educator, lawyer, and journalist John Wesley Cromwell, among many others..

Like the east side of DC as a whole, the cemetery has suffered from lack of resources and investment over the past fifty years.  Fewer than a hundred monuments or grave stones remain both visible in their original location, and of these some are in poor condition. Several hundred lay in small piles amid grass on the north side of the property.   Hundreds more are remain obscured by brush and small trees. 

The Cemetery is on the National Register of Historic Places, but it in shameful condition. It's time to do something about it.

The newly reinvigorated Woodlawn Cemetery Perpetual Care Association is seeking groups and individual volunteers to:

-Clear trees, bushes and brush and put them in dumpsters to be hauled away

-Cut  English ivy from trees

-Remove trash

-Assist with stream-bed restoration