Oakland Cemetery

248 Oakland Avenue SE (see on map)
404-688-2107
Website

The 88-acre Oakland Cemetery, 1.5 miles southeast of downtown, is Atlanta’s oldest historic cemetery, founded by the city in 1850. As it was Atlanta’s only municipal cemetery for many years, all sections of society are represented there, with the graves of rich and poor, Black and White, all in close proximity.

Oakland Cemetery is a repository for many fine examples of 19th-century funerary art and of the period’s memorial styles, as well as reflecting a cross-section of the city during an important era in its development.

Oakland Cemetery has several distinct sections. At the north end of the cemetery is the 6-acre African-American section, a segregated area in which the city’s Black residents were buried. There are also separate Jewish and Confederate sections, and a potter’s field, where the city’s paupers were buried and which is believed to contain around 7500 graves.

Famous burials include Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell; golfer Bobby Jones; Atlanta’s first mayor, Moses W Formwalt and also its first African-American mayor, Maynard Jackson; and Edwin P Ansley and Joel Hurt, the founders, respectively, of the Ansley Park and Inman Park neighborhoods.

Westview Cemetery

1680 Westview Drive SW (see on map)
404-755-6611
Website

Westview Cemetery, located about 4 miles west of Atlanta’s downtown, is the largest non-military cemetery in the southeast, and among the largest in the United States. Private individuals established the 582-acre burial ground in 1884, on land that had once formed a part of the site of the Civil War Battle of Ezra Church. It was intended as an alternative to the then almost full Oakland Cemetery.

The cemetery, the resting place for well over 100,000 people (so far), has hundreds of beautiful examples of late-19th and 20th-century funerary statuary, mausoleums and other memorials. Though less famous and less visited than Atlanta’s older Oakland Cemetery, it is worth a trip.

Other than the graves, the highlight of the cemetery is its 1943 Westview Abbey, a huge European-inspired stone mausoleum and abbey whose three stories and bell tower provide a unique and unexpected backdrop to Westview’s gentle, grave-strewn hills. The building, extensive and ornate, holds thousands of burials, and has a series of stained glass windows depicting the life of Christ.

Westview has several other notable features and landmarks. Its 1890 gate house and tower, built shortly after the founding of the cemetery, is one of the oldest surviving structures in Atlanta. There is also a receiving tomb, which had the distinction of holding a large number of people killed in the 1918 flu epidemic; a Confederate monument; and an unusual crenellated water tower.

Many of Atlanta’s best-known citizens are buried at Westview, including Henry Grady, one of the leading proponents of the “New South;” Joel Chandler Harris, author of the Br’er Rabbit stories; Lemuel Grant, who donated Atlanta’s Grant Park to the city; and Asa Candler, founder of the Coca-Cola company.

South-View Cemetery

1990 Jonesboro Road SE (see on map)
404-622-5393
Website

South-View Cemetery, located approximately 4 miles south of downtown Atlanta, was founded in 1886 as a place of burial for Black Atlantans, the first African-American cemetery to be established in the city. Originally 25 acres in size, it now extends to 100 acres.

Local Black businessmen created the new cemetery at a time of increasing racial tension. It was part of a broader trend in Atlanta (and elsewhere) for African-Americans to establish their own spaces apart from whites, where they could conduct their lives and business while enduring less of the prejudice and discrimination met with in the city at large.

Barred from entering Atlanta’s other cemeteries through the main gate, Black citizens desired a cemetery of their own, in which they could bury their dead with the same dignity afforded to the city’s whites. Although the majority of people buried at South-View are of African descent, the cemetery has never discriminated on the grounds of race.

South-View Cemetery is the final resting place of many individuals significant in Atlanta’s history and culture, including many Civil Rights activists, educators, entrepreneurs, performance artists and members of the clergy.

Most famously, the cemetery was the original burial place of Martin Luther King, Jr, although his remains were later moved to the Martin Luther King, Jr National Historical Park, a few miles away.

The cemetery is the site of over 80,000 burials, and remains open to new interments. In 2014, the Historic South-View Preservation Foundation was created to preserve and interpret the cemetery’s legacy.

Greenwood Cemetery

1173 Cascade Circle SW (see on map)

Greenwood Cemetery, located about 6 miles southwest of downtown Atlanta, was created in the early 20th century. Its main significance is as the site of Greek, Chinese and Jewish burials, and of a National-Register-listed memorial to the Holocaust.

Private investors incorporated Greenwood Cemetery in 1904. In 1907, it opened to burials. The cemetery was originally closed to African-American burials (it was officially desegregated in 1987), but it allowed interments from other ethnic groups. In 1911, two special sections were established for the burial of people of Greek and Chinese heritage. Greenwood also has a large section dedicated to people of the Jewish faith.

Greenwood’s small Greek Section, of around an acre, has numerous monuments, mostly inscribed in Greek. There is also a small church, constructed in imitation of the Parthenon.

The Chinese section has a large central obelisk, 30 feet high, dedicated to the Chinese Free Masons (a different organization to the more widely-known Free Masons), and many smaller graves, their inscriptions in Chinese characters. Several dozen Chinese people from Atlanta and from further afield are buried here.

The cemetery’s Jewish section is much larger, with many graves of Jewish people from Atlanta and around. Greenwood Cemetery is also home to Atlanta’s Holocaust Memorial, A Memorial to the Six Million. Each of its six 19-foot torches represents the lives of 1 million Jews, killed in concentration camps. On the inner walls of the memorial are the names of people killed in the Holocaust whose relatives came to live in Atlanta.