African Burial Ground National Monument at Duane Street and African Burial Ground Way (Elk Street) in Lower Manhattan (New York City) preserves a site containing the remains of more than 400 Africans buried during the late 17th and 18th centuries in a portion of what was the largest colonial-era cemetery for people of African descent, some free, most enslaved. Historians estimate there may have been 15,000-20,000 burials in what was called the "Negroes Burial Ground" in the 1700s. The site's excavation and study was called "the most important historic urban archeological project in the United States."
The discovery highlighted the forgotten history of African slaves 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, which had the second largest number of slaves in the nation after Charleston, South Carolina. Scholars and African-American civic activists joined to publicize the importance of the site and lobby for its preservation. In 1993 the site was designated a National Historic Landmark and in 2006 a National Monument.
In 2003 Congress appropriated funds for a memorial at the site and directed redesign of the federal building to allow for this. A design competition attracted more than 60 proposals for a design. The memorial was dedicated in 2007 to commemorate the role of Africans and African Americans in colonial and federal New York City, and in United States history. A visitor center opened in 2010 to provide interpretation of the site and African-American history in New York.
Read more about African Burial Ground National Monument: Africans and African Americans in New York City, "Negros Burial Ground", Discovery of Site and Controversy, African Burial Ground Studies, Memorial, Visitor Center, Legacy
Famous quotes containing the words african, burial, ground, national and/or monument:
“Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did. I have no illusions on this score, nor do I believe that any Asian nation or African nation, in the same state of dominance, and with the same system of colonial profit-amassing and plunder, would have behaved otherwise.”
—Han Suyin (b. 1917)
“On the beach at night,
Stands a child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.
Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“When we dream about those who are long since forgotten or dead, it is a sign that we have undergone a radical transformation and that the ground on which we live has been completely dug up: then the dead rise up, and our antiquity becomes modernity.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the “tough guy;” today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)
“The monument of death will outlast the memory of the dead. The Pyramids do not tell the tale which was confided to them; the living fact commemorates itself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)