HISPANIC CULTURE - Day of the Dead
St Peter Claver Catholic School is a historic Black Catholic school with over 118 years in service of the Black community of Macon, Georgia. We are a little more diverse today and we love to provide our students of different faiths and ethnicities opportunities to celebrate and appreciate each other and their backgrounds. November 2020, in partnership with the Hispanic ministry in our parish and families of some Hispanic students who attend SPCCS, we celebrated Day of the Dead —with a little twist.
We partnered with our local historic Black cemetery, Linwood Cemetery. It is a historic landmark that is very important to the history of our neighborhood and is the final resting place of many important Black ancestors. However, like much of our neighborhood, it has unfortunately fallen into disrepair. In partnership with the cemetery we want to work to change that. So before the big day, we did a day of cleaning at the cemetery. Then on the day itself, we turned out with costumes, food and graveside decorations to celebrate the stories of three people interred there that have connections to our school and local education. The people we celebrated were:
Mattie Hubbard:
Our parish donated the land right next to our school to the County to become the first public playground for Black children in the county. The playground was run by Ms. Hubbard for decades and many of our alumni from the neighborhood have fond memories of Ms. Hubbard for whom the playground is now named.
L.H. Williams:
Dr. Williams was the principal of the Negro School for the Blind in our neighborhood and the local public school (across the Mattie Hubbard Playground from SPCCS) is named after him. He lived and worked in our Pleasant HIll neighborhood.
Sgt Davis is Macon’s only Medal of Honor recipient and attended SPCCS. During the Vietnam War Sgt. Davis, an African-American, jumped on a grenade and saved the lives of his fellow soldiers all of whom were white. He is interred in the cemetery in a place of honor but little visited.
We had a lovely celebration and learned a lot about two very different cultures that, in the respect that they give to their forefathers, are more similar than at first appears.
