Statement:

This series explores how some African American history in Tampa Bay has been both buried and endangered, pushed aside in the name of progress while Black communities continue the work of remembering. Now vacant, Robles Park Village, Tampa’s oldest public housing complex, was built on top of approximately 1.5 acres of Zion Cemetery. Created in 1901, it was Tampa’s first African American burial ground. Nearly 800 graves were paved over, as discovered in 2019 during an environmental assessment. Just a few miles away, The Jackson House, which was one of the few places in Tampa where Black visitors could stay during segregation, now stands in disrepair, overshadowed by new development and surrounded by parking lots. Fragile…yet remarkably resilient. The Jackson House welcomed guests who helped to shape history, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jackie Robinson and countless musicians and leaders who found refuge there when the city excluded them elsewhere.

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By photographing these sites as unorthodox landscapes, I position the land itself as a site of memory and erasure. Cracked pavement, peeling paint, chain-link fences and reflections become landscapes of struggle. They are visual evidence of how history is overwritten, yet never fully erased. The obscuring of these local landmarks parallels broader efforts to rewrite the past, from the banning of books, that teach about slavery, segregation and civil rights, to textbook revisions that soften or omit the realities of systemic racism. At the same time, there are ongoing efforts to restore, preserve and correct these erasures, such as campaigns to save the Jackson House or community remembrance projects at Zion Cemetery. Yet, these restorative acts often face resistance, reflecting the larger struggle over whose history is valued and remembered. My presence in these spaces is both emotional and intentional: to hold witness, to resist forgetting and to point toward the ongoing work of Black preservation.

As a Black woman and photographer, photographing these places is not only about recording their fragility but about positioning myself within a longer tradition of Black resistance, insisting that these stories, these spaces, these lives remain visible.

- raichelle colbert-ruffin