WEST PALM BEACH -- King Nana Kwame Akuoko Sarpong stooped like a man broken from the weight of the world and poured water onto the mass grave bearing 674 souls who died in the Hurricane of 1928.
Lightly splashing water from his crystal vase, the West African chief called on his ancestors and past black American beacons like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. He thanked leaders who fought to preserve the tragic site on the tree-lined hill at the end of Tamarind Avenue.
"I come from Ghana, across the ocean, to perform this traditional prayer, wishing not only the recognition of the departed souls," he said, "but for the movement that remembers the past for everybody, but that also remembers the past of African-Americans in this part of the world."
This is the piece of land where after the third-worst national disaster in U.S. history, 674 bodies of mostly black Glades farmworkers were dumped and burned in a mass burial.
The death toll on Sept. 16, 1928, is believed to represent the largest one-day loss of black people in United States history, according to John Irwin, a local resident who helped persuade the city to preserve the site.
Until about a dozen of years ago, the site had been lost to history. But it was remembered by many who lived in the neighborhood.
Two months ago, the city dedicated the site with a historical marker and has plans to erect a 4-foot decorative fence and put in landscaping.
And Barry Krischer, state attorney for Palm Beach County, last month proposed building a museum to house the legal papers crucial to the struggle to desegregate Palm Beach County public schools, said Robert Hazard, of the Storm of '28 Memorial Park Coalition.
Hazard invited King Nana Sarpong to perform Friday's rites.
As the paramount chief of an area in Ghana, Sarpong represents about 100,000 people. Ghana's constitution weaves the system of government imposed by the British with the traditions of the people. The water he poured represents the sustenance of life, Hazard said.
Luvenia Washington, known locally as Mama Loue, said her father, John B. Thomas, helped bury the bodies so many years ago. As Thomas -- who lived to the age of 100 -- lay on his death bed four years ago, he could still smell the flesh of bodies, she said.
She witnessed the ceremony to help preserve this once-unmarked history.
"I didn't put my hands on it, but my father did," said Washington, 71, "and I felt I should have been a part of it."
