African Burial Ground, New York: An Examination Of Enslaved Lives and a construction Of Ancestral Ties
AFRICAN BURIAL GROUND, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
The African Burial Ground, also called the Negro Burial Ground, in lower Manhattan, is perhaps the largest and best-known African cemetery in history. The cemetery was used between the late 1600s and 1796, a period when 10 to 20 percent of the citys inhabitants were African. Once located outside the walls of the colonial city of New York, the burial ground may have originally contained between 10,000 and 20,000 burials. The skeletons, artifacts and documents of the people buried there tell volumes about their lives. Yet, the treatment which the cemetery itself has received over the years might alone fill several chapters on the African-American struggle for human rights.
In colonial New York City, Africans were not permitted to bury their dead in church cemeteries, whether they had converted to Christianity or not. The African Burial Ground was a municipal cemetery afforded their use, where they buried their loved ones carefully and with generosity. Research has shown that the bodies were wrapped with care in linen shrouds and methodically placed in well-built cedar or pine coffins. Women were sometimes buried in the same coffin as their newborn children, both having died at about the same time. In another telling example, a child was found buried with a solid silver ear-bob or pendant, an object of rare economic value for these impoverished people, which apparently had greater value to them as a gesture of care for the deceased child.
This cemetery provided a rare setting in which the enslaved could assert their humanity and respect their own culture, but not without resistance. The English who fled the colony and its African captives objected to the nighttime funeral rituals at the site and repeatedly passed laws that attempted to limit funerals to the daytime, thus limiting those attending to fewer than 12 people and forbidding the use of palls or symbols for the adornment of coffins. These intrusions coincided with English suspicions that funerals were serving as meetings for organized resistance to African enslavement.
Also, as part of the Municipal Commons, the burial ground became the site for executions by hanging, burning and breaking, in retribution for the African revolt of 1712 and the alleged revolt of 1741. In 1794, the African Burial Ground was ordered closed by the American authorities. Yet our researchers have recently found coroners documents showing that the corpses or fresh burials of African-American children would occasionally be found in the cemetery as late as 1796.
The cemetery was filled and built over by Dutch-Americans in the early 19th century. Their cisterns and privies were then dug through the graves. Meanwhile, the African descendants and loved ones of those buried there remained enslaved. And many would continue to be until 1827. Although late 19th and 20th century urban development periodically unearthed human skeletons with little apparent concern for sanctity, the African Burial Ground had, by then, largely faded from everyones memory.
Meanwhile, African Americans in New York City held meetings, religious observances, vigils, and protests at the cemeterys edge. While the disrespectful treatment of the cemetery and its descendant community by Euro-American controlled institutions had not qualitatively changed since the 1600s, the African-descended community had acquired greater political influence than it had in the days of the doctors riots and used it to ensure proper treatment and protection of the remains of those who rested in this place. Today this National Historic Lanmark in lower Manhatan is the only preserved African burial site in an urban area. The skeletal remains of over 400 men, women and children of African descent were discovered druing a 1991 federal construction project.
SOURCE: MICHAEL L. BLAKERY, PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY, HOWARD UNIVERSITY, LAWRENCE E. WALKR FOUNDATION, 2004
