Digital subscriptions provided by the City of Gulfport THE GABBER.COM No. 2813
May 18, 2023- May 24, 2023
A Dream Lies Buried Here When Delaney Roque enrolled in Dr. Gary Mormino’s “Modern Florida” capstone course at USF St. Petersburg last fall, the college senior had no idea that time spent doing archival research would win a top award from the Florida Historical Society. A history major minoring in women’s and gender studies, Roque originally planned to write about notable occupations held by members of St. Petersburg’s Black community during the 1950s and 1960s. Learning about Gulfport’s Lincoln Cemetery After Roque began to examine archival records and historic documents, the research took a different direction. While cross-referencing the names of individuals found in newspapers with burial indexes created by organizations such as the Pinellas Genealogy Society, Roque discovered that hundreds of names did not appear in already-existing lists of persons interred at Lincoln Cemetery, a burial site for St. Petersburg’s Black residents since its creation in 1926. Finding incomplete and inconsis-
ASHLEY MARTINEZ
By James Schnur
A USF St. Pete history course inspired Delaney Roque’s interest in Gulfport’s Lincoln Cemetery.
tent information, Roque changed the paper’s focus. Entitled “Step Softly, a Dream Lies Buried Here,” the research paper examined how
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Gulfport’s Lincoln Cemetery represents the Black community’s perseverance, as well as how past Unpacking continued on page 8