Practically next door neighbors, Wilberforce and Central State University have championed African-American success stories for years. And a local cemetery in southwest Ohio tells a story of the prominent figures who helped shape the Midwestern state.
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WILBERFORCE, Ohio — Each tombstone in Massies Creek Cemetery bears witness to a life, some cry out for equality while others whisper of education, faith, and family.
About five feet tall and covered in a mossy brown fuzz, one stone remained difficult to decipher until a local historian retrieved a toothbrush from her car and gently rubbed the marker. The strokes revealed a simple inscription: Name, birth date, death date. But the years between those dates, from 1851 to 1901, tell the story of the man laid to rest, and a winding walk from this marker to the cemetery edge and back to the front gates takes a visitor past the graves of more than a century’s worth of key African-American figures. 
The gray monument marks the grave of the Rev. Samuel Mitchell, a Toledo-born president of Wilberforce University. He is among numerous nationally and regionally notable African-Americans buried alongside white community members in the Greene County cemetery located between Wilberforce and Cedarville in southwest Ohio.
Roderick Blount, who wrote his 2011 master’s thesis about this and another area cemetery, can’t walk but a few steps without stopping to marvel at a marker. Here, on a grassy slope, a pink-streaked monument designates the grave of Reverdy Ransom, an African Methodist Episcopal Church bishop. Near the back stands the elegant stone of William Scarborough, a Greek and Latin scholar, author, and another Wilberforce University president.
Hallie Q. Brown’s marker lists her achievements as teacher, elocutionist, writer, and humanitarian. The large, brick library at nearby Central State University bears her name and a historical marker outside the building chronicles her life, including her 1873 graduation from Wilberforce, and describes her “powerful, scathing speech against discrimination.”
And in the cemetery’s center towers a glossy monument to Martin Delany, son of a free black mother and enslaved father and described as the “Father of Black Nationalism.”
“Delany is definitely the most prominent person buried in that cemetery, white or black,” Blount said.
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