New Partnership Aims to Rehabilitate Deteriorating African Burial Ground Monument
As Black History Month begins, Congressman Dan Goldman has helped broker a partnership between Lower Manhattan’s African Burial Ground National Monument – the Lower Manhattan site that holds the remains of an estimated 15,000 African-Americans from the colonial era (both free and enslaved) – and the newly formed African Burial Ground Memorial Foundation, a private non-profit organization that aims to raise funds for maintaining and operating the site.
Announcing a philanthropic partnership agreement between the foundation and the U.S. National Park Service (NPS), the federal agency that oversees the monument, Mr. Goldman said, “this partnership, which has been years in the making, is critical to the continued funding, operation, and maintenance of the African Burial Ground, which is one of the most historically important monuments to Black history in New York.
The foundation’s most immediate goal is physical restoration of the monument, parts of which have been “temporarily” closed since August 2022. The monument’s outdoor Ancestral Chamber, Ancestral Libation Court, and Spiral Processional Ramp are “showing signs of stress and must be assessed prior to reopening,” the NPS said in a statement, adding, “multiple hairline fractures along the foundation and the apparent shift of some materials have given park officials cause for concern. The monument has a subway beneath the structure that may have redistributed the weight of the black marble on the Ancestral Chamber.”
The foundation will advise the National Park Service in soliciting proposals from technical consultants with expertise in stone engineering and restoration, and in the longer term, will focus on developing curriculum about the African Burial Ground for public school students and create in-person and digital tours of the site.
Located near Duane Street and Broadway, the monument is the oldest and largest known historic burial ground in North America for free and enslaved Africans. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991, became a National Historic Landmark in 1993, and was designated as a National Monument in 2006. DNA samples from remains have enabled researchers to trace the home roots in Africa of individuals buried at the site. The photograph at right show remains of enslaved Africans being disinterred in the early 1990s, after the cemetery had been forgotten for centuries.
Enslaved Africans first arrived in what was then called New Amsterdam in the 1620s. By 1741, they comprised nearly one-fourth of New York’s population, and the city’s headcount of black men and women in bondage was second only to that of Charleston, South Carolina. In that year, a rash of fires was ascribed to an alleged plot among slaves and impoverished white residents. For good measure, British colonial administrators also charged that both the cabal and the fires were inspired by secret allegiance to the Vatican. By the time the hysteria had subsided, dozens of supposed conspirators had been burned at the stake or hanged.
The site now known as the African Burial Ground was first recorded as a place of interment for enslaved and free black people in the early 1700s, and once covered more than six acres. The location appears to have been chosen because it was at the outskirts of the settled area of Lower Manhattan. Decades later, it became a favorite target of grave-robbing physicians, for whom research cadavers were in short supply. This culminated with a riot in 1788, in which most of New York’s doctors were forced into hiding, while cavalry units were called into the streets to disperse outraged crowds.
The rioter’s anger was soon rendered moot by the pressures of the New York real estate market, as the urban core began to expand northward. The small valley that had marked the site was covered by 25 feet of landfill, burying the cemetery, as the site was mapped for development. In the 1840s, America’s first department store opened nearby, and the Negroes Burial Ground (now deeply submerged) was mostly forgotten until the late 1980s, when excavation for the foundation of a new federal office building on Broadway between Duane and Reade Streets began unearthing hundreds of centuries-old corpses, which historians quickly determined were the remains of colonial-era African Americans. Many of these intact graves contained artifacts related to African tribal religions and burial practices. The new federal office building was redesigned to leave space for a memorial, and to rebury the hundreds of human remains that had been disinterred during construction.