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New York City's African Burial Ground
By Rebecca Dresser
In 1991, when construction began on a Federal office building in lower Manhattan near Broadway and Duane Streets, building planners knew the site once held a cemetery for enslaved and free Africans. But, because nearly 200 years had passed since its last internment, the builders thought that any vestige of the past would have disappeared long ago. What they found astonished them. Almost 20 feet below the surface, lay the remains of over 400 people. When urban archeologists confirmed the significance of the site, it was of unprecedented historical significance for African Americans. Known as the African Burial Ground, the area is part of an original, five-acre site containing the estimated remains of 10,000-20,000 people, making it the largest and oldest African cemetery excavated in North America. The Federal Government designated the site a National Historic Landmark in 1993.
Although many people think slavery was limited to the American South, the institution thrived in New York until 1827 when the state abolished it. During colonial times, New York City ranked second only to Charleston, South Carolina, as a slave trading center. In fact, slaves constituted nearly 40 percent of the population of the original Dutch colony. Enslaved Africans began arriving in New Amsterdam as early as 1626, but the burial ground did not come into use until about 1712 when Trinity Church banned blacks from its cemetery. At that time, Africans were provided a desolate area a mile outside the city limits so they could bury their dead. But by 1794, when the city looked to expand beyond its colonial walls, it appropriated the grounds and closed the burial grounds. Years of detritus and landfill covered the site, and its original purpose lay largely forgotten until work commenced on the new Federal building nearly two centuries later.
A team of anthropologists led by Dr. Michael Blakey of Howard University (now at the College of William and Mary) studied the recovered bones for a glimpse into the lives of these long-dead New Yorkers. Filed teeth and ear bobs, shroud pins, beads, cowry shells, and pottery shards could be traced to their West African origins. DNA scraped from tooth enamel revealed clues about diet. Bone lesions on skeletal remains pointing to muscle tears and spine fractures from extreme overwork testify to malnutrition and disease among these enslaved people. Some graves held musket balls with their skeletal remains. Buttons with still visible insignia of the British Navy like those worn during the American Revolution attest to an allegiance some blacks had with the Loyalists who promised slaves their freedom. Moreover, anthropologists determined that nearly 40 percent of the graves contained remains of children under the age of 12.
In spite of the thousands in bondage who passed through the city during the 17th and 18th centuries, there is no public commemoration, except for the African Burial Ground, to those African men and women whose labors built the city. In the years since it made its discovery, the project has been hounded by controversy, lack of funding, and accusations of mismanagement. Today, the site exists only as a small plot of empty grass, squeezed between skyscrapers, surrounded by a nondescript chain-link fence, and marked by a modest wooden sign. Plans for further study and preservation suffered another setback when the Office of Public Education and Information, which housed the African Burial Ground Project, was destroyed in the World Trade Center disaster of September 11, 2001. Although the Project's library and research was lost, most of the artifacts kept there were miraculously recovered intact from the rubble.
Rebecca Dresser is a history researcher living in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
Bibliography
"African Burial Ground Artifacts Recovered." Heritage Preservation [Online]. Heritage Preservation. Accessed January 7, 2003.
http://www.heritagepreservation.org/NEWS/WTC6.htm
Blakey, Michael L. "The New York African Burial Ground Project: An Examination of Enslaved Lives, A Construction of Ancestral Ties." Transforming Anthropology, 7 (1), 1998.
"Burial Ground of Unkept Promises." New York Times, October 6, 2002, 12 (4).
Ferris, Marc. "Neighborhood Report: Lower Manhattan; 8 Years After the Bones, More Battles." New York Times, March 21, 1999, 6 (14).
Greene, Marcia Slacum. "No Rest for African Burial Ground." The Washington Post, August 27, 2002, 01(A).
Hansen, Joyce and Gary McGowan. Breaking Ground Breaking Silence: The Story of New York's African Burial Ground. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998.
Goldberg, Carey. "DNA Offers Link to Black History." The New York Times, August 28, 2000, 10 (A).
Jordan, Rob. "Forgotten Ground Zero." Columbia News Service, April 3, 2002.
Staples, Brent. "Editorial Observer; History Lessons From the Slaves of New York." New York Times, January 9, 2000, 18 (4).
Williams, Erica. "The African Burial Ground Project Reveals New York City's Hidden History of Slavery." Manhattan South, Spring 2000, 34.
Wright, Donald R. African Americans in the Colonial Era. Wheeling, Illinois: Harland Davidson, Inc., 1990.
State Archives:
http://www.sos.state.ga.us/archives/rs/sarl.htm
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Listen to a narrative describing burial practices.
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"I assisted her and her husband to intern the infant ... and its father buried it with a small bow and several arrows, as well as a little bag of parched meal, and a miniature canoe about a foot long, with a little paddle. With this, he said, [the child] would cross the ocean to his own country. He also buried a piece of white cloth with several curious and strange figures painted on it in blue and red, by which his relations and countrymen would know the infant to be his son and would receive it accordingly. He then cut a lock of hair from his head, threw it upon the dead infant, and closed the grave with his own hands. He told us the God of his country was looking at him and was pleased with what he had done."--Charles Ball
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