Haven of Rest Cemetery

Haven of Rest Cemetery in Little Rock (Pulaski County) is the largest African American cemetery in Arkansas and consists of more than eighteen acres and over 7,000 burials. Established in the early 1900s, the cemetery is located along 12^th Street in the University Park neighborhood. Burials at the cemetery include civil rights activists, medical pioneers, and civic and religious figures. This cemetery was listed by the Arkansas Cemetery Board as a historical cemetery.

Daisy Bates and Scipio Jones are among the notable civil rights figures buried in the cemetery. Bates was elected president of the Arkansas State Conference of branches for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was co-publisher of the Arkansas State Press newspaper with her husband L. C. Bates, and served as a mentor of the Little Rock Nine who desegregated Central High School in 1957. Attorney and educator Scipio A. Jones was the first African American to serve as a judge for the Little Rock police court. He is famous for defending the twelve Black men condemned to death after the Elaine Massacre in 1919. Other notable figures buried at Haven of Rest are pharmacist and poet Frank Barbour Coffin; physician and insurance pioneer Fred T. Jones; nurse and hospital administrator Lena Lowe Jordan; physician G. W. S. Ish; educator Helen Booker Ivey; educator, newspaper editor/publisher, businessman, and civil rights pioneer J. H. McConico; city manager Mahlon Martin; and Marion Taylor, the first Black officer in the Arkansas State Police.

Close to the center of the cemetery is a boulder displaying a plaque honoring the twenty-one boys who died in a 1959 fire at the Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville (Pulaski County). Fourteen of the boys who could not be identified were buried in a mass grave at the cemetery. In addition, there is a plaque memorializing the 1927 lynching of John Carter at the cemetery.

Haven of Rest has been established as a perpetual care cemetery, one that has a permanent maintenance fund for upkeep. The cemetery has no more burial plots to provide for the public to purchase, however, and therefore does not take in any money from burials. Instead, it depends heavily on money to be placed in a trust or donations for maintenance and care of the facility.

In 2008, the Friends of Haven of Rest Cemetery was established with the purpose of raising funds to clean up the cemetery and combat problems such as overgrown grass, sunken or tilting headstones, and flooding.

For additional information:
Dover, Elicia. “Community Connections: Haven of Rest Cemetery.” KATV, February 24, 2022. https://katv.com/community/community-connections/community-connections-friends-of-haven-of-rest (accessed December 20, 2023).

“Haven of Rest Cemetery.” Find a Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/54264/haven-of-rest-cemetery (accessed December 20, 2023).

O’Neal, Rachel. “A Grave Situation.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, April 7, 2019, pp. 1E, 6E. https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2019/apr/07/a-grave-situation-20190407/ (accessed December 20, 2023).

Kathy Lynn Harris
Henderston State University