Blacks in Manhattan: The African Burial Ground

I've backtracked five years to give a short chronicle of black people and their migration up the island of Manhattan. This is swiped from American Legacy, for which I wrote this article in 2003 called "At Rest".


And so they were buried. After two centuries of lying forgotten in the ground, and another dozen years being studied, squabbled over, and finally, honored, 419 wooden caskets, decorated with traditional West African symbols and village scenes were lowered into crypts in a small plot of land next to 290 Broadway, all that remains, in any practical sense, of an African burial ground, the oldest known cemetery of its kind in the United States.

As I walked along Reade Street toward Broadway on my way to the reinterment ceremony in October 2003, I in all likelihood walked near more graves, all located under downtown buildings. The original burial ground spread across five to six acres of lower Manhattan that is today bounded by Duane Street and City Hall Park on the north and south, Broadway on the west and Centre Street on the east. Archaeologists estimate that during the eighteenth century some 20,000 Africans were buried there. I looked up at the tall buildings around me and struggle for a new metaphor that would have to do with rising up, or flight, or the soul and come to the conclusion that this city does not so much rise up as recycle. That was certainly not the case at the beginning, though.

The first Dutch used slaves to build the settlement of New Amsterdam, including its famous wall for which the city’s financial district would be named, and its fort (which would, incidentally, be saved from blowing sky-high in 1689 by a Negro man who discovered and put out three fires, set by Papist arsonists, that had been set near 6,000 pounds of gunpowder). The Dutch worked the blacks literally to death, then sent to Africa for more. The English provided no relief when they sailed into the harbor in 1664 and took over the island. They, too, indulged in the slave trade setting up on Wall Street in 1711, a thriving slave market that operated for 50 years; during this time New York City was second-only to Charleston, South Carolina, as a slave-trading center. As under Dutch rule, slaves died prematurely, but not always as victims. In 1712 a group of Africans ambushed and killed at least nine whites on the outskirts of the city in an attempt at a revolt. Afterward, 21 blacks were executed and buried in an unwanted piece of land a half mile northwest of the city limits that had been designated as an African burial ground.

In 1795 the land was sold and its new owners built over the graveyard. The slaves had been forgotten. After all, why would the Dutch, and the English after them remember creatures that meant less to them than their livestock? To them, the Africans had been virtually invisible and their bones were just part of the earth, like manure, or worms, or dead leaves. Not quite 200 years later the federal government decided to erect a building at the spot where other things had stood and been torn down countless times. This is the way of things, right or wrong, things get recycled here a lot. I am reminded how, when asked about the long-lost grave of Alexander the Great, the renowned Egyptian archaeologist Dr. Zahi Hawass says he guarantees that the person who finds it will be doing something as mundane as digging a hole for a swimming pool. Here in New York breaking the ground to build something as ordinary as a 34-story federal office building yielded a treasure of inestimable value. In Athens, and Rome, and Alexandria, huge projects are shut down when an artifact is found. In New York City, too, there were people—mostly black, no longer slaves—to speak for this treasure. So construction ground to a halt, and we were given a chance to bring the slaves, the invisible people back into the world of the living for just a while.

The bones were sent to Dr. Michael Blakey and his team of biological anthropologists at Howard University, who studied them for 10 years, and from this research we learned about who these people were. They came from many parts of West and Central Africa. Most of them were males between the ages of 15 and 25. Of the more than 400 skeletons, about 40 percent were children. Many of the Africans had died of malnutrition. From fractures and lesions on the skeletons, we know that these people were worked beyond their capacities, yet their survivors managed to provide them with proper burials; they were wrapped in linen shrouds and given beads, shells, and coins—money for the other side. Each body was placed so that its feet pointed east, toward the motherland.

When I walked into the yard next to 290 Broadway and saw the waiting coffins I felt peace, not sorrow even when I noticed showing numbers, instead of names, dangling from the caskets. The people to whom these bones belonged had already been buried by those who knew their names. I was there to see them reinterred, but more important, I was there to thank them for giving their history back to us, the living.

Some people left flowers other offerings; some touched the beautiful new coffins carved by woodworkers in Ghana and prayed. Four caskets sat by themselves on a dais. They held the remains of a man, woman, boy, and girl, and had traveled apart to ceremonies in Washington D.C., Baltimore, Wilmington, Delaware, Philadelphia, Newark, and Jersey City, New Jersey, and finally, New York City. White-gloved pallbearers, somber in tuxedos, their expressions turned inward, arrived and lifted these representative caskets to begin the procession to Foley Square. All at once, amid the relative quiet, above a general murmur, came a strident voice. A man dressed in African robes, from what tribe I could not tell, protested that everything was being done wrong, that the bones were being disrespected, that they should be buried in Africa. I silently disagreed: They should remain here iin the place the people they belonged to helped build, and where they'd lived out their lives.

The angry man served to remind me, though, that the African Burial Ground project has not been without its problems. A lot of allegations thrown in many directions during the dozen years of the effort: accusations of racism and misconduct, disrespect, stonewalling, and downright dishonesty. Quite frankly, I hadn't seen a shred of evidence that would prove anyone had intentionally tried to do harm to the project, or the bones. Were mistakes made? Were some people clumsy about things? Were others, in their zeal, insensitive? Most likely. But enough people came together, bringing their skills and passion to bear to lead us to that day.

When I entered Foley Square, I saw a burst of color and activity. Choirs shouted spirituals, and an African song of mourning was offered up; a fiddler and a dancer raise the ghosts of the Negroes who danced for eels in nearby long-gone markets where the South Street Seaport now stands. Drummers led the pallbearers into the square. There were prayers of different faiths. Who knows exactly to whom these blacks of long ago prayed? There were words spoken by celebrities and politicians. There was a quiet moment at the start of the tribute, and that finally brought an ache to my throat: Dr. Kofi Asare Opoku a religious scholar from Ghana, poured a libation of water out of a small gold bowl onto the ground and prayed in his native tongue, a simple gesture amid all the celebration. It brought me back to what it was really all about.

In the end there was a procession to a small grassy patch that is all that's left of the burial ground. Many tears shed, and the bones were lowered and laid to rest once again.

For more information on the African Burial Ground Project visit the project Web site here.

Photographs: John T. Stuart