STANDING ON SACRED GROUND: AFRICAN BURIAL GROUND; LOWER MANHATTAN
New Yorkers were shocked when a burial ground believed to
contain the remains of more than 15,000 people of African descent was found
beneath Lower Manhattan.
The discovery highlighted the forgotten history of enslaved
Africans in colonial and federal New York City, who were integral to its
development. By the American Revolutionary War, they constituted nearly a
quarter of the population in the city. New York had the second-largest number
of enslaved Africans in the nation after Charleston, South Carolina.
(Source:Wiki)
A $275 million federal construction site in 1991 unveiled the cemetery dating back to the 17th and 18th centuries when so-called “Black people” were still enslaved in the state. It is the largest and oldest collection of colonial-era remains of free and enslaved Africans in the United States, according to the National Park Service. Which was called the "Negroes Burial Ground" in the 1700s and NY’s earliest known African-American "cemetery".
It took protests by activists, scholars, politicians, and
Black New Yorkers to halt construction on the government building and contract
an African American anthropologist to oversee the exhumation of the remains of
419 men, women, and children.
Ultimately, the African Burial Ground Project shattered
barriers for people of color in science, creating a diverse team of
geneticists, anthropologists, chemists, archaeologists, and other researchers
to work on the dig and analyze the remains.
Instead of following traditional research methods — doing
work in private laboratories, out of view of the public — project director
Michael Blakey treated the descendant African American communities like clients
and let their desires guide the team’s research. Their questions were personal,
rather than scientific.
They wanted to know where the people were from but also what
their lives were like, whether they resisted slavery and how their culture
evolved from African to African American.
Black New Yorkers also pushed to conduct the analysis at
Howard University, where Black historians, archaeologists, skeletal biologists,
and anthropologists would guide the work. They wanted to ensure that the analysis
of the remains went beyond superficial questions. (Source:WP)
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