Muncie Times, Muncie, Delaware County, 19 December 2002 — Page 11

The Muncie Times, December 19,2002, page 11

WITNESS FOR JUSTICE Future of NY City African Burial site fuels controversy

IN 1991, construction workers began to dig the foundation for a new $300 million federal government building in Lower Manhattan. It all came to a halt when workers dug into a burial ground, where they found wooden coffins and human remains. Investigators were called in and discovered that this was a colonial burial ground used to bury Africans who were not permitted to be buried in church cemeteries, even if they had converted to Christianity. Thus began the modern-day saga of the African Burial Ground in New York City. These hallowed remains seem now to be threatened for the third time. The African Burial ground is a 5 or 6 acre cemetery that was used between the late 1600’s and 1796 and originally contained between 10,000 and 20,000 burials. Despite the harsh treatment that these African people in colonial America seemed to receive, the 427 remains,

which- were finally recovered from the site, were buried with great care and love, wrapped in linen shrouds in methodically positioned in well-built cedar or pine coffins, sometimes with beads-or other treasured objects, occasionally with ornamentation on the coffin. The African Burial Ground in many ways is a concrete reminder of the contribution of African people, both slave and free, to'the building of New York City. Many Americans were not aware that New York was a slave state in the early days of the nation. New York had the largest number of enslaved people in North America, except for Charleston, during the 18th century. Indeed, it is estimated that Africans made up between 14 and 20 percent of New Yorkers during those days. The cemetery has forced some New

Yorkers, and others, to at least acknowledge the presence of African people in New York City’s earliest days and to begin to understand the reality of their life there. The majority of these Africans lived under harsh conditions of slavery. Surprisingly, though, we now know that in 1644, eleven slaves were freed and each was given a farm grant to land which had been abandoned by the whites during the Dutch and Indian wars. It is the land that is currently Chinatown, Little Italy, SoHo and Greenwich Village. It was hoped that these African people would be a buffer between the whites and the Indians. Several of these former slaves became wealthy, including Susan Anthony Roberts, who reportedly owned land south of Wall Street, including what is now New York University, and Simon Congo, who owned 40 acres which now includes what is now Union Square Park. But less than a century later, after the end of the wars with the Indians, all of this land had been taken back by whites. The burial ground, a desolate piece of unappropriated land outside the city limits, was used by these Africans in America often during evening and

nighttime funerals, but the English who held the colony objected to these and passed laws to limit the funerals to the day, as well as limiting the number of people attending the funerals to 12 and forbidding the use of palls or symbols on the coffins. This was, in actuality, to limit the possibility that the slaves were using funerals as occasions to organize resistance to their slave masters. In 1712 and 1741, the burial ground was the execution site, by hanging, burning and breaking, for those involved in the slave revolts of those years. But even as the European American settlers would not allow the Africans to be buried in their cemeteries, they also did not honor the sacredness of the African Burial Ground. They built tanning and pottery industries next to the burial ground, from where they threw their refuse from these industries onto the site. Moreover, medical students at New York Hospital regularly stole corpses from the burial ground in'the late 1700s. In 1794, the African Burial Ground was ordered closed and it was filed over by the Dutch Americans in the early 1800s. Their cisterns and privies were then dug

throughout the gravesites. Slavery ended in New York State in 1827 and the African Burial Ground was forgotten as the City of New York grew. It was forgotten until those construction workers dug into that ground. Initially, the federal government tried not to comply with legal mandates about what to do in such a situation. But African American New Yorkers, including then Mayor David Dinkins, pressed the government to respect the remains found there and to find a way to honor this sacred space. After vigils and protests and religious ooservances and meetings held at the site by many in the community, construction was halted, until all the remains could be unearthed and moved to be studied, with the promise that they would be re-interred at the site.

Bencie Powell Jackson is executive minister of the United Church of Christ’s Justice & Witness Ministries. You can reach her at 700 Prosepct Aye., Cleveland OH 441151110, Phone: 216-736-370Q.