Volunteers and students gathered to cleanse the homes of the dead on the eve of Halloween.
About 200 students and volunteers gathered Saturday at Sweet Olive Cemetery to prepare for All Saints’ Day.
Sweet Olive, a historically African American cemetery, has been neglected, according to the Mid City Redevelopment Alliance. Rotten trees, weeds, worn graves and vault damage create a macabre sight.
Conditions have worsened since Hurricane Gustav, said Mallory Sharp, mass communication senior. The clean-up project is a part of the Manship School of Mass Communication’s public relations campaign class.
The class “works as a real-life campaign program” that teaches students the process of making campaigns, Sharp said.
Several students have been working since the beginning of the semester with the Mid City Redevelopment Alliance, a nonprofit Baton Rouge community development organization.
“We chose [the Sweet Olive project] because we wanted to make a difference in the Baton Rouge community,” Sharp said.
The cemetery cleanup initiative “Sweet Olive Rescue” was organized to encourage the preservation of Baton Rouge’s historical cemetery.
Mid City Redevelopment Alliance hopes to map the cemetery and record every tombstone, but the current state of the cemetery has made it impossible.
“The cemetery does not have its own financing,” said Samuel Sanders, executive director of Mid City Redevelopment Alliance.
Sweet Olive depends on volunteer maintenance, Sanders said.
Sharp and several other students were faced with the task of finding sponsors and recruiting volunteers through posters, brochures, media and press releases.
Mid City Redevelopment Alliance helped students and volunteers paint fences, landscape the exterior of the cemetery and remove rotten tree trunks, debris and brush.
Allison Sage, mass communication freshman, said keeping the cemetery clean is important because “everyone deserves
respect, even after they die.”
Sage and Taylor Pearson, international studies freshmen, spent two hours scraping old paint and re-painting the graves white.
Kenzel Ricks, a fourth grade student at Capitol Elementary, attended the clean-up with his sister and members of Healing Place Church.
“This helps my community,” Ricks said. “These people are going to have a nice home to rest in.”
 
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Contact Julian Tate at [email protected]