African Burial Ground National Monument - Discovery of Site and Controversy

Discovery of Site and Controversy

After the discovery of the first intact burials became publicly known, the African-American community became very concerned. With the pressure of construction costs, GSA tried to continue excavation and construction on the site. The community believed it was not being consulted with sufficiently and that respect was not being given to the nature of the discoveries. They believed that the burial findings required a better archeological project design for protection and study of the remains.

Initially, GSA had planned full archeological retrieval of the remains as full mitigation of the effects of its construction project on the burial ground. Within the year, its teams removed the remains of 420 persons from the site, and it had become clear that the extent of the burial ground was too large to be fully excavated. In 1992, activists staged a protest at the site about GSA's handling of the burial issue, especially when it was found that some intact burials were broken up during construction excavation at part of the site.

GSA halted construction until the site could be thoroughly assessed. It provided additional funding to conduct a further archaeological excavation to reveal any other bodies on the site and to assess the remains. Located between City Hall and the federal courts, the site had symbolic value. The “invisibility” of Black history in New York City partially accounts for the importance of the Foley Square site"; activists hoped to find a means there to redress "the injustice and the imbalance of the historic record, and to give voice to the silenced ones".

Critics of the construction project believed GSA's original archeological research design was inadequate, as it did not require a plan for the treatment of uncovered remains. In addition, the African-descendant community in New York City was not consulted in the development of the research design, nor were any archaeologists who had experience studying the African diaspora, although GSA had distributed the EIS to more than 200 state and local agencies and stakeholders, many recommended by the city. In the early stages of the project, national GSA officials and related Congressional committees directed that excavation and construction proceed.

Oversight of the project increased by stakeholders, such as the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation and community activists. After continued protests from a coalition of community members, politicians, and scholars, in 1992 the House Subcommittee on Public Works held budget hearings for GSA in New York, at which it heard testimony from a wide variety of critics of GSA's handling of the project as well as from the GSA Administrator. Several changes occurred. Control of the burial site was transferred from an archeological firm in the city to the physical anthropologist Michael Blakey and his team at Howard University, a historically black college, for study at the Montague Cobb Biological Anthropology Laboratory. This ensured that African-American students would participate in studies of their ethnic ancestors' remains.

In large part due to activism by the African-American community, which lobbied the US Congress on this project, in October 1992 Congress passed and President George H. W. Bush signed a law to redesign it in order to stop construction of the pavilion portion of the site (where the remains had been found) and appropriate $3 million for a memorial in that area. The federal building project was redesigned to preserve part of the archeological site for this purpose. The southern portion of the building, slated to be built on the parcel by Duane and Elk Streets, was eliminated to provide adequate room for a memorial.

The burial ground was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992, as the extent of the burials made it significant for both regional and national history. Given its importance, GSA proposed partial mitigation of the adverse effects to the burial ground of the construction of 290 Broadway, by undertaking programs of data analysis, curation, and education. In addition, activists lobbied for landmark status for the burial ground, and gathered 100,000 signatures to send to the Department of Interior. The ground was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1993. There was also growing support for a museum on the African-American experience and history in New York.

The discovery and long controversy received national media attention, raising interest and awareness in public archeology projects. Theresa Singleton, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution said,

"The media exposure has created a larger, national audience for this type of research. I've been called by dozens of scholars and laypeople, all of them interested in African-American archaeology, all of them curious about why they don't know more about the field. Until recently, even some black scholars considered African-American archaeology a waste of time. That's changed now."

Government and private developers learned about the need to "include descendant communities in their salvage excavations, especially when human remains are concerned."

The findings at the burial ground already had highlighted some of the losses of slavery, as African Americans had not been recently recognized as a major part of early New York history until then. As the journalist Edward Rothstein wrote, "Among the scars left by the heritage of slavery, one of the greatest is an absence: where are the memorials, cemeteries, architectural structures or sturdy sanctuaries that typically provide the ground for a people’s memory?"