Detroit Memorial Park

This may be the most quietly powerful cemetery in metro Detroit, and its story starts with an injustice. Before 1925, Black Detroiters were routinely denied a dignified burial — made to bury their dead at night, through side gates, in the far back, at inflated prices, or turned away entirely. So a group of Black morticians, doctors, and ministers, led by Charles C. Diggs Sr., did what disenfranchised Detroiters have always done: they built their own. They pooled their money, bought 85 acres of Warren farmland (they couldn’t purchase land inside Detroit), and founded Detroit Memorial Park — Michigan’s first Black-owned cemetery and its first Black corporation.

When the township tried to reclaim the land, the founders secured it the only way that would hold: with a burial. Baby Emma Brown, stillborn, was laid to rest here one night in 1926, and the cemetery was real. A century later it’s a landmark — the resting place of inventors, congressmen, and Motown royalty, and a monument to a community that refused to be turned away even in death. On our list, with deep respect.