Miami's pallbearers: A dying breed

By Daniel Lak BBC Miami correspondent

Sixty-seven-year-old Johnny Ralph is wearing a black suit and shiny white gloves. He carries a small wooden gavel and a tattered blue pamphlet.

Ceola Walker and Johnny Ralph: Oldest and youngest Pallbearers

As Grand President of the Number 1 International Association of Pallbearers, he has certain duties and responsibilities. And calling on the oldest living member of his organisation is one of them.

Mr Ralph and Ceola Walker, 96, are sitting on the porch of her small, stucco walled home in north-west Miami. They're talking about the funerals they've attended over the years as Pallbearers members.

Making sure that members of their organisation have a proper, even festive, funeral is what the Pallbearers are all about.

"If someone died," says Whittington B Johnson, a retired professor of African-American history from the University of Miami, "they had to get a good funeral.

"People called it 'putting her away proper'. If you had a band, a good meal, lots of people and procession through the streets, then you'd been 'put away proper'."

Grand funerals

The Pallbearers began during the Great Depression in the 1930s when economic collapse exacerbated racist policies of segregating whites from blacks and denying the latter even basic services, like access to graveyards and funeral services.

Pallbearers' "lodges" sprang up to ensure that members could put a little money away each month and have the grand funeral they desired.

Blacks were separated from whites even in the cemeteries

"Oh, we've been to hundreds of funerals," says Mr Ralph, Ms Walker nodding in agreement.

"We had marching bands, candlelight processions, meals that we called 'big eats' and of course, lots of prayers to God, thanks and praise."

The lodges reflected the influential role of the church in the black community of the time. Ms Walker says her fondest memories of being president of the Pallbearers before Mr Ralph come from the fellowship of shared worship.

"We gave thanks to the Lord," she says, "for the love and the luck he gave us, even while we prayed for the departed at the funerals."

But few young black Americans are even interested in the Pallbearers any more, says Mr Ralph.

"We try to get them to join, but now it's just us old folks," he jokes with Ms Walker.

'Crying shame'

In fact, Mr Ralph is the youngest member of the 15 Pallbearers remaining in Miami. Once there were hundreds of members across the state of Florida.

"It's a shame, a crying shame," says Enid Pinckney, a pillar of the local church and an amateur historian of the black community in Miami.

"Young people take freedom for granted, they don't know who sacrificed what and what we had to put up with, so they have equality. They forget how bad it used to be."

I used to go to so many funerals that I had to collect the obituaries just to prove to my wife that I wasn't up to no good George Saunders, Trumpet player

Ms Pinckney recently organised a re-enactment of a funeral procession through Miami's historic black neighbourhood of Overtown.

The almost raucous tones of the Progressive Coronet Marching Band, a venerable Miami institution, attracted hundreds of people to the city's once segregated municipal cemetery to watch the ceremony.

Trumpet player George Saunders is 90-years-old and has been marching with the band for more than half his life. He remembers the halcyon days of the pallbearers with great fondness.

Then he got to play his trumpet many times a week. Now it's only once in while for commemorative events like that organised by Ms Pinckney.

"I used to go to so many funerals that I had to collect the obituaries just to prove to my wife that I wasn't up to no good. I'd tell the Pallbearers, I'll come and play at your funeral, but you have to give me an obituary or I'll get in trouble."

No-one in Miami wants to return to the days of racial segregation, but the loss of institutions like the Pallbearers is making some members of the black community yearn for the certainties of the past.