Vandals have pushed over more than 200 headstones at a historic African American cemetery in Collingdale, including the stone of famed Philadelphia civil-rights activist Octavius V. Catto.
While there have been incidents of racial vandalism in eastern Delaware County in recent months, police do not believe these acts were racially motivated.
Delaware County NAACP officials are troubled by the rash of incidents.
"The NAACP and its representative members in Delaware County are deeply grieved that human relations in this area have taken on this personality.
Collingdale police are still seeking suspects in an incident that occurred when vandals carved racial epithets into two cars owned by a black family.
In May, a black couple found a swastika painted on the door of their newly purchased Lansdowne home. That month, a Harrisburg-based white-supremacist group littered an Upper Darby neighborhood with more than 250 racist posters.
Racist graffiti were also discovered behind the bleachers at Lansdowne's Penn Wood High School, where minorities make up 95 percent of the student population, and on the sidewalk in front of a black-owned business on Baltimore Avenue in Clifton Heights.
Delaware County chapters of the NAACP have discussed the racist graffiti in recent meetings and aim to form a plan for bringing greater awareness and education to the community.
Eden Cemetery was established in 1902. The first interment was delayed until nightfall to avoid local white protesters who blocked the cemetery's entrance that day, according to information from the cemetery.
A number of notable African Americans are buried in Eden Cemetery: Marian Anderson, the first African American singer to perform at the New York Metropolitan Opera; Chris J. Perry, founder of the Philadelphia Tribune; and Catto, who was shot and killed on election day in 1871. Catto, a political and civil-rights activist, had been helping black voters get to the polls and was killed while walking home.
