Collection: Lincoln Memorial Park - Miami

Located in Miami’s Brownsville neighborhood, the twenty-acre cemetery was founded in 1923 on a flat plot of ground purchased by African American mortician Kelsey Leroy Pharr. According to legend, a white land owner discovered Pharr secretly burying lynching victims on the owner’s vacant lot. Moved by compassion, the man agreed to sell the property to Pharr for use as an African American burial ground. Following the cemetery’s opening, Pharr continued to purchase parcels of land, eventually consolidating the present twenty acres in 1937. The site was touted as the “finest colored cemetery in the south” and included burials of the wealthy and poor, alike. Today, the cemetery houses the remains of over 10,000 African Americans, including veterans of many wars, from the Civil War to the Iraq War. Some of Miami’s most influential figures are also interred here, including D.A. Dorsey, the city’s first African American millionaire, H.E.S. Reeves, the founder of Miami’s first African American