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NAACP hosts wreath-laying ceremony at Ebenezer cemetery
Annual event remembers formerly enslaved buried in unmarked graves
Realyn Lonon
Leroy Lloyd, past president of the Effingham County Branch NAACP, holds the djembe while Raelyn Kassidy Lonon, 6, plays to welcome the ancestors to the ceremony Feb. 24 in Ebenezer. (Photos by Barbara Augsdorfer/Effingham Herald.)

black history month art
The Effingham County Branch NAACP held its eighth-annual wreath-laying ceremony where more than 200 former enslaved persons are buried in unmarked graves next to the Jerusalem Lutheran Church cemetery in Ebenezer. Most of the people buried there drowned trying to cross Ebenezer Creek in December 1864 to escape Gen. Sherman's March to the Sea.

About 50 people attended the memorial in the breezy but partially sunny plot of land surrounded by pine trees that whispered above in the wind.