“The Colored Folks Cemetery,” as a deed from 1903 describes it, is a smaller, privately maintained cemetery behind the city of Statesboro’s publicly maintained Eastside Cemetery. It is the earthly resting place of Edna McCray Baldwin, who at 102 appeared in news reports in November 2008 as one of the oldest voters going to the polls in Washington, D.C., to vote for Barack Obama as America’s first black president. Although she was a D.C. resident for more than 40 years, when Baldwin died the next July she was returned to Statesboro for burial.
A cemetery apart
Local family makes upkeep of historic black cemetery their personal mission