Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Fox 26 News Report


HOUSTON - For three years researchers for Rice University and Prairie View A&M have joined together to try to restore the 100-acre Wyatt Chapel Cemetery in Waller County.

They're using a GPR machine to locate the final resting places of slaves and African American military veterans who followed them.

"It sends radar waves into the subsurface. Those radar waves then bounce back up to the transmitter and it records changes essentially in the subsurface," says Rice University researcher Davin Wallace.

So far researchers believe they have found about 100 graves in the cemetery on the northside of the Prairie View campus.

Ironically one gravestone reads "gone, but not forgotten."

Prairie View professor Akel Kahera says researchers hope to turn those words into indisputable truth.

Kahera says "it's important to know who we are, where we come from and where we're going."

Researchers pledge to keep going until each grave site is found and each person buried there receives the dignity they earned in life.

"The least we can do for them after they're gone is to honor their legacy, Kahera says.

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