Freedman's Cemetery Marks a Deep North Dallas Community Story

Freedman's Cemetery, near Uptown, was established in 1861 as a burial ground for Dallas's early African American community. It is tied to historic North Dallas, a segregated Black neighborhood that lasted from the Civil War era into the 1970s.

The site was almost erased. North Central Expressway cut through the area in the 1940s. Graves were covered, and the land became a city park until work in 1990 found hundreds of marked graves and many more unmarked ones.

A memorial now marks the cemetery. Around it, modern Uptown and Central Expressway sit over a much older community landscape.