Violet Park Cemetery correspondence

Violet Park Cemetery was a cemetery for African Americans in Durham named after the mother of John Merrick, one of the three N.C. Mutual Life Insurance Company founders, who along with partners Aaron McDuffie Moore and Charles Clinton Spaulding were the cemetery's initial owners. African Americans were prohibited from being buried in the same cemetery as white people and most African American cemeteries were not able to be supported with the same resources as cemeteries for white people due to structural racism. The cemetery was later nicknamed Wolf Den Cemetery due to a homeless person living there with a group of dogs.

Death certificates were first issued in Durham County in 1908 and death certificates were required by North Carolina state law only since 1913. Violet Park Cemetery had approximately 1,948 burials recorded between 1913 and 1943. Beechwood Cemetery was opened in 1926 in response to Durham cemeteries for African Americans being overfull and in need of resources for upkeep, including: Violet Park Cemetery, Geer Cemetery, Fitzgerald Cemetery, and Hickstown Cemetery. Merrick died in 1919 and his grave was one of those moved from Violet Park to Beechwood Cemetery. Durham County acquired the land on which Violet Park Cemetery remained in 1965 when the former owner could not pay assessments for street improvements. In 1994 St. Titus Episcopal Church owned the acreage and, due to plans for a parking lot, planned to move the 200 to 1,000 remaining graves, many of which were unidentified.

R. Kelly Bryant, who was a Durham historian, community leader, and N.C. Mutual Life Insurance Company Assistant Secretary in charge of the Conservation Department, collected and preserved numerous African American funeral and cemetery records. Carrie McNair also worked to compile African American cemetery records and catalogued Violet Cemetery records in September 1994 from the vital statistic books of Durham County, as well as records in 1997 for Grove Hill Cemetery, and records in 2003 for Geer Cemetery.