African Burial Ground National Monument
Engraved
on the Ancestral Chamber monument at the African Burial Ground (Photo by Hunner)
Tucked tightly into a corner of downtown Manhattan, dwarfed
by massive federal office buildings, the African Burial Ground National
Monument pays homage to the millions of slaves that lived not just in New York,
but throughout the country. Placed under seven burial mounds on a third of an acre,
the remains of 419 Africans and African-Americans give tribute to those slaves
and slave descendants who helped build this country in the 17th, 18th,
and 19th centuries. Thousands more lay beneath the busy streets of
Manhattan. In fact, between 15,000 and 20,000 people of African descent were interned
in a six acre area near today’s City Hall. In the 1700s, New York City held the
distinction of having the second highest numbers of slaves in the British
colonies, after Charleston, South Carolina.
At the turn of the 16th century, the Lenape, an
Algonquin people, hunted, fished and farmed in the area between the Delaware
and Hudson Rivers. With some local variations, they were similar to the
Powhatan of Virginia. As with Native Americans elsewhere, they managed their natural
resources well. Europeans who encountered the East Coast often marveled at the
abundance of game and fish in this “wilderness.” This abundance came from the
care that the Lenape and other tribes took to avoid over-exploitation of their
regions.
Europeans arrived in New York in the early 16th
century. Giovanni da Verrazano and his crew visited this extraordinary natural port
in 1524. In 1609, Henry Hudson laid claim for the Dutch to this area, who established
the New Amsterdam colony in 1624. In 1626, Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan
Island from the Lenape for sixty guilders (around $24) in trade goods and built
a fort on its southern tip to support the Dutch West India Company’s fur trade
operations on the Hudson River watershed.
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| The Castello Plan of New Amsterdam (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons) |
Slavery in New York
As mentioned in the chapter on colonial Jamestown, slaves imported from Africa made an early entrance into the colonies on the East Coast. In 1626, a Dutch West India Company’s ship unloaded eleven slaves at New Amsterdam; however, many of the Dutch settlers were uneasy with slavery, so there was little private ownership. Slaves of the Dutch West India Company worked on official projects like repairing the fort, splitting logs for the palisades, clearing land, cooking lime for plaster, building docks and roads, and growing and harvesting grain and other crops. These slaves laid the foundation for a viable colony.
With the Dutch, slaves could gain “half-freedom.” They paid
an annual tax and could be called for work by West India Company when needed.
They held some rights, including the ability to bear arms in times of
emergency, they married in the Dutch Reformed Church in Manhattan, and some of
them owned their own homes. This more lenient attitude about slaves changed
with the coming of the English.
In the 1660s, the British challenged the Dutch dominance of
the Atlantic trade. On September 8, 1664, threatened by English soldiers and
frigates, Governor Peter Stuyvesant lowered the West India Company’s flag which
ended the Dutch colony in North America. Manhattan and its surrounding lands
now changed its name to New York, in honor of the Duke of York, King Charles
II’s younger brother,
Under English control, slavery increased. As a center for
trade between England, its American colonies (including West Indian plantations),
and Africa, New York transshipped slaves, sugar, and sterling in a profitable exchange
of goods and peoples. Ships delivered slaves to docks north of the palisades of
the fort which gave rise to a vibrant African community. Perhaps 15% of African slaves captured in Sub-Saharan Africa were Muslims according to the "Islam and the United States" podcast on Backstory.
The English curtailed some of the slaves’ freedoms including the practice of their religions and allowed harsher types of physical punishments. Then around 1698, the newly built Episcopalian Trinity Church in southern Manhattan took over the city’s cemetery, and banned African burials there. Slaves, freed blacks, and some whites looked elsewhere for grave sites. As black communities thrived in the areas of Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, and City Hall, a cemetery also grew and eventually expanded to over six acres along the eastern edge of the island.
The English curtailed some of the slaves’ freedoms including the practice of their religions and allowed harsher types of physical punishments. Then around 1698, the newly built Episcopalian Trinity Church in southern Manhattan took over the city’s cemetery, and banned African burials there. Slaves, freed blacks, and some whites looked elsewhere for grave sites. As black communities thrived in the areas of Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, and City Hall, a cemetery also grew and eventually expanded to over six acres along the eastern edge of the island.
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| (Courtesy New York Public Library Picture Collection Online) |
Ceremonies at the burial ground resurrected traditional
rites from Africa. Wrapped in shrouds and placed in wooden coffins, some bodies
had coins over their eyes (for payment of passage through the afterlife) while
others had shells, glass beads, or buttons placed on them. They were buried
with their heads pointing west, similar to the practice in Africa. Rev. John
Sharpe in 1713 wrote: “They are buried in Common by those of their country and
complexion without the office; on the contrary the Heathenish rites are
performed at the grave by their countrymen.”[1] Imagine African burial ceremonies outside
of consecrated churchyards and devoid of Christian ministers returning to their animist or Muslim roots.
As New York grew, so did the population of slaves. In 1664,
when the English took over, New Amsterdam had around 1,500 white settlers, 300
hundred slaves, and 75 freedmen. The 1703 census counted 4,400 whites and
between 600 and 700 slaves, and in 1746, as prosperity spread through the
colony, the city had a total population of 11,720 which included 2,440 slaves,
about twenty percent of all residents. By then, perhaps half of the city’s
households had at least one slave.[2] In
all the English colonies in North America, only Charleston, South Carolina had
more slaves than New York City. As England incorporated the great port city of
New York into its mercantile economy of sugar, rum, and other riches from the
Americas, the city’s businesses and farmers turned to slave labor more and
more. New York City depended on cheap labor and thus, slavery grew.
We often understand slavery as it evolved into an
institution supporting southern plantations. Actually, the northern colonies first
officially recognized it. In 1641, Massachusetts legalized chattel slavery, as
did Connecticut in 1643, Rhode Island in 1652, and New York in 1664. The South
came late to legalizing slavery when, in 1664, Maryland declared that all
blacks in the colony, all those imported into it, and all their children would
be enslaved for life. By the end of that decade, Virginia enacted similar
legislation. By the end of the 17th century, African slaves were a legally
protected labor force in British North America.
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| Exhibit panel at African Burial Mound NM (Photo by Hunner) |
Slaves worked as both skilled and unskilled laborers. In
truth, slave labor built the colonies and without them, the colonies would not
have thrived. From farm workers harvesting tobacco to blacksmiths pounding out
horseshoes, from urban slaves laying pipelines in New York City to construction
slaves who helped erect the United States Capitol and the White House, slaves first
helped to build the colonies and then the Republic.
Most slaves lived a brutal life. Long hours under a hot sun
doing hard field labor, physical as well as sexual abuse, the wrenching
separation of wives from husbands, of parents from children, and a lack of
food, all contributed to a miserable existence and a legacy of racism that
still haunts their descendants and the nation.
As agriculture adapted to the industrial revolution, the
cash crop in the South shifted from tobacco to cotton. In 1810, the South
produced 200,000 bales of cotton. By the start of the Civil War, spurred on by
the textile mills in New England and England, the South produced 4,000,000
bales. Slaves provided the labor for this rapid expansion. In 1700, almost
28,000 slaves populated British North America. By 1740, that total equaled
150,000 and both cotton plantations and northern merchants and communities
reaped economic rewards as slaves worked in fields, in the shipbuilding and sail
making yards, in iron foundries, in sawmills, at rum distilleries, and a wide
variety of other industries and factories. Thus, by the Revolutionary War, the
population of American slaves had grown to 452,000 – about one-fifth of the
entire colonial population.
From the mid-15th century, the peoples of Europe, Africa,
and the Americas transformed the Atlantic world into an economic dynamo based
on ships, slaves, plantation crops, and manufactured goods. Without slaves, the
industries, municipalities, and large farms would not have prospered as they
did. And New York did prosper. By the 19th century, New York City was one of
the most prosperous ports and financial centers in the country. In all, 12 million Africans were captured and enslaved in the Americas.
Creation of the African Burial Ground National Monument
The African Burial Ground National Monument is a recent and
complicated addition to the NPS. The General Services Administration planned a
$276 million, thirty-four story building to house offices for the United States
Attorney, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Internal Revenue
Service. In digging the foundation for this building in 1991, the remains of
over 400 people were uncovered. After discovery, the skeletons were taken away
to Lehman College in the Bronx for conservation and study.
Protests arose from the African-American community over
several issues. First, with the bones wrapped in newspaper and taken to Lehman
College in cardboard boxes, many felt disrespected. Second, the African-American
community was not consulted on what to do with the remains. This sparked
discontent as it touched the lack of control that African-Americans have over
their heritage. They protested that the fate of these ancestors resided in the
hands of federal bureaucrats who ignored African heritage and just wanted to
build an office tower quickly and on budget. As a result of the controversy, GSA
regional director William Diamond halted construction at the building site.
The House Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds
(which appropriates funding for GSA projects) held a meeting in New York to
address the African Burial Ground. Committee chair Gus Savage (D- Ill.)
abruptly ended the hearing after he heard that the GSA knew about the
likelihood of burials even before it purchased the land. He said that he would
not approve funding any GSA projects until he heard "a more honest and
respectful response" concerning the burial ground. He added:
"Don't waste your time asking this subcommittee for anything else
as long as I'm chairman, unless you can figure out a way to go around me! I am
not going to be part of your disrespect."[3] Consequently,
the GSA set up an advisory committee which moved the remains to Howard
University where Dr. Michael L. Blakey served as the burial ground's scientific
director. In a decade of scientific research, Dr. Blakey led some seventy forensic
scientists, anthropologists, and African-American scholars who studied the human
skeletons.
On October 3, 2003 , the remains of the 419 people were
re-interred under seven burial mounds at the site. Dr. Blakely addressed that gathering:
“With the project, we knew that we were peeling off layers of obscurity. We
were also doing something that scholars within the African diaspora have been
doing for about 150 years and that is realizing that history has political
implications of empowerment and disempowerment. That history is not just to be
discovered but to be re-discovered, to be corrected, and that African-American
history is distorted. Omissions are made in order to create a convenient view
of national and white identity at the expense of our understanding of our world
and also at the expense of African-American identity.” Under the streets of New
York City, evidence of our pasts lay buried by both dirt and obscurity. The
discovery and study of such evidence has created a fuller understanding of the
African-American experience and identity in the United States.
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| Burial mounds for 419 Africans and African-Americans (Photo by Hunner) |
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| Aerial View of the African Burial Ground (Courtesy NPS) |
African Burial Ground National Monument
290 Broadway, 1st Floor
New York, NY 10007
(212) 637-2019
