Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery was brutally vandalized the night of Monday, August 20th. Grounds workers discovered during the course of their duties Tuesday morning that at least 43 memorials, monuments and gravestones had been intentionally damaged. Some of the damage was minor, disrespectful but fixable with a cleaning. Much of it was considerably more severe, ranging from a trampled 19th-century American flag to shattered headstones. The total estimated cost of repair is more than $100,000.

Urns were cracked and pushed off their bases. Four marble crosses were toppled; three of them broke into pieces.

Two memorial porcelain photographs of the deceased were scratched repeatedly; another was smashed with a rock. Three gravestones were smeared with mud. And, this: a trash receptacle rolled down a hill, two stop signs were folded in half, and a Toro Workman cart was pushed up an embankment in an apparent effort to turn it over.

Three headstones in the Law family plot were knocked over. The mausoleum of the Bourne family, designed by Beaux-Arts architect Ernest Flagg, had one of a pair of classical stone vases framing it toppled and broken in two. The cemetery is in the process of contacting family members of all the vandalized graves, but it’s taking some time to reach the families of people who died in the mid-19th century. Their contact information is not current, needless to say.

Although Green-Wood, like most cemeteries, has dealt with vandalism before, it has excellent security. The 478-acre grounds are surrounded by a high cast iron fence; there are video cameras all over the park and a car patrol that operates 24 hours a day. A possible suspect was captured on video. The recording has been handed over to the NYPD Hate Crime Task Force which is investigating the case.

The cemetery has already begun making repairs and will foot the bill, but they are asking for donations to help defray the cost. Click here if you would like to contribute.

Established in 1838, Green-Wood was one of the first garden cemeteries in the country. Spacious burial grounds set in a landscaped park-like environment on the outskirts of a city were a reaction to the increasingly crowded urban churchyards which were often putrid, poorly guarded and vermin-infested. Old remains in such places had to be regularly disinterred to make room for new ones since there was little room for expansion.

Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris was the first garden cemetery established in 1804. The first one in the United States was Mount Auburn Cemetery outside Boston in 1831. Its pastoral vista of rolling hills with classical monuments, bodies of water and groves of trees had the appeal of an English garden, then a popular landscaping trend. It was also non-sectarian, unlike the churchyards which determined who could be buried in them based on their religious affiliation.

So beautiful and peaceful were the new garden cemeteries that they become popular tourist attractions. People would make a day of it and picnic on the grounds. These wide-open pastoral spaces for the dead inspired the creation of wide-open pastoral spaces for the people still living in the city, hence the construction of Central Park in New York City.

In the late 19th century, Green-Wood was the premiere burial ground for the rich and famous of New York. It also provided eternal rest to Civil War veterans, including ones who couldn’t pay, and to the victims of tragedies like the Brooklyn Theater Fire of December 5th, 1876.

Some of Green-Wood’s 560,000 permanent residents include composer Leonard Bernstein, several Roosevelts, newspaper publisher Horace Greeley, Lola Montez (the dancer and courtesan whose charms brought down King Ludwig I of Bavaria), pioneering journalist Nellie Bly who famously beat Jules Verne’s fictional Phileas Fogg to go around the world in a record 72 days, Louis Comfort Tiffany and Boss Tweed.

There are some lovely pictures of the cemetery today and in years past on Green-Wood’s Flickr photostream. Even today it’s a tourist destination, known not just for interesting themed tours of its permanent residents, but also for its excellent bird-watching and as a Revolutionary War battlefield (the Battle of Long Island was fought there).

A previously unknown interview given by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1960 has been discovered in the attic of a Nashville home. Stephon Tull was looking through old boxes of his father’s when he came across a reel labeled “Dr. King interview, Dec. 21, 1960.” He borrowed an old reel-to-reel player from a friend and listened to the recording. It was of his father interviewing Martin Luther King, Jr. about the civil rights movement, the philosophy of non-violence, the political impact of that year’s sit-ins and his certainty that the child his wife Coretta was carrying would be a boy. (He was right; Dexter Scott King, Dr. King’s second son, was born just over a month later.)

Tull had no idea that his father, an insurance salesman, had recorded an interview with King as part of a book he planned to write. The book would have been a first person exploration of his father’s childhood in segregated Chattanooga and his adult life in Nashville under Jim Crow and during the civil rights era. The book was never completed, and Tull’s father stored the recording in the attic. Stephon doesn’t know if anyone other than his father heard the recording before he stashed it away. His father is in his 80s now. He’s ill and is currently under hospice care, so he’s not able to fill in the blanks on this remarkable find.

Here’s the only clip I’ve been able to find from the recording:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-T4pO2OpSQ&w=430]

Mr. Tull is asking Dr. King about the effect of the sit-ins that were held at segregated lunch counters all over the South in 1960. The sit-ins in Nashville had taken place earlier that year, from February 13th to May 10th, at the whites-only lunch counters of Woolworth’s, Walgreens and other major downtown retailers. Congressman John Lewis, then a student at Nashville’s Fisk University and of the philosophy of non-violent protest, was one of the notable participants.

The earliest sit-ins passed without incident, but as they continued they engendered increasing wrath among the business owners and segregationist crowds. By the end of February, sit-in protesters were getting arrested for disorderly conduct. The pro-segregation protesters harassing and attacking them were not. To support the sit-ins, religious leaders from Nashville’s black churches encouraged a boycott of businesses with segregated counters. An estimated 98% of Nashville’s black population participated in the boycott. Retailers promptly felt the financial sting.

On April 19th, the home of Z. Alexander Looby, a lawyer who was defending many of the demonstrators arrested at sit-ins, was bombed. He and his wife were unharmed, but the incident spurred a major protest in which 4,000 people marched on City Hall. The protest leaders met with Mayor Ben West on the courthouse steps, and he agreed publicly that segregation was immoral but said that store managers had to decide on their own whether to serve customers regardless of the color of their skin. On May 10th, a half-dozen Nashville retailers opened their lunch counters to black customers, making Nashville the first major city in the South to begin to desegregate its facilities.

It wasn’t smooth sailing from there on out, needless to say. Desegregation would remain an arduous struggle over the next four years until the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited segregation in public places in the entire country.

Martin Luther King’s thoughts on non-violent protest and the sit-ins are well-known. He released many interviews and wrote about the topics extensively. Another subject addressed in Tull’s recording is of particular interest to historians: King’s recent trip to Africa and how the civil rights movement in the United States had an impact on the independence movements taking root on that continent.

In another part of Tull’s recording, King describes a recent trip to Africa. He explains to Tull’s father the importance of the civil rights movement both in the United States and abroad.

“There is quite a bit of interest and concern in Africa for the situation in the United States. African leaders in general, and African people in particular are greatly concerned about the struggle here and familiar with what has taken place,” he said, “We must solve this problem of racial injustice if expect to maintain our leadership in the world, and if we expect to maintain a moral voice in a world that is two thirds color.”

According to Clayborne Carson, founding director of Stanford University’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, King is talking about a trip to Nigeria he took in November of 1960, just a month before the Tull interview. King was personally invited to Lagos by Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nigeria’s first governor-general of African descent, to attend his inauguration on November 16th, 1960. In 1963, Azikiwe would become the first president of the independent Republic of Nigeria.

Carson notes that there isn’t very much information out there about the Nigeria trip. King didn’t do any interviews or press conferences while he was there, nor does he talk about the Nigerian trip in any extant letters or documents. The Tull interview is a rare gem on that score.

Stephon Tull is planning to sell the recording through collector and broker Keya Morgan in New York City. Will it fall into the private abyss or will a museum, the King Center or another institution get to preserve it for posterity?