Debate Grows Over Burial Ground Memorial

[Im The Truth]

DEBATE GROWS OVER BURIAL GROUND MEMORIAL
Date: Monday, October 04, 2004
By: Associated Press
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...9819969.htm?1c
http://www.blackamericaweb.com/site....urialground103

NEW YORK - When more than 400 slaves were reburied last year at a site unearthed by construction workers in lower Manhattan, the occasion was marked by singing, dancing — and promises for an elaborate memorial. Today, the site is marked by only one small sign.

While a large-scale memorial is in the works, those involved with the burial ground say the government needs to do more to make it a prominent landmark among New York's myriad cultural and historical attractions.

"Everybody needs to know this is not just part of African-American history, it is a part of New York City history and American history," said Howard Dodson, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which is planning an anniversary celebration of the internment Monday.

Closed in 1794 and long forgotten as construction landfill eventually buried it 20 feet underground, the five-acre spot was the final resting place for tens of thousands of slaves and free blacks. It was unearthed during construction of a federal office tower in 1991.

The site — today surrounded by City Hall and other municipal buildings — is to have a $2 million memorial by fall 2005. Plans for a $2 million interpretive center are under consideration as well. But community activists have complained about the slow pace and selection process.

The federal General Services Administration, which manages the site with the assistance of the National Park Service, will choose a winning design from five finalists — culled from more than 60 submissions — by November after a series of public hearings.

Many in the black community did not want a memorial that covered too much of the burial site or required digging because that "would further disturb our ancestors," said Ayo Harrington, chairwoman of Friends of the African Burial Ground, an informal advocacy group. All five designs cover the site to some degree.

She also is disappointed that the public will not be selecting the winning design for the memorial.

Eileen Long-Chelales, a regional administrator for GSA, said the agency will consider public comment along with recommendations from a board that included architects and historians. The finalists already have incorporated ideas into their designs from community feedback, she said.

"The communication between the descendant community, GSA and the Park Service has never been better," Long-Chelales said. "Obviously there were some issues, but the communication has improved dramatically."

When the burial ground was discovered, it was community pressure that prompted the government to abandon work on the federal office tower and begin examining the remains when the burial ground was discovered. A final scientific report on the remains, due out next fall, is expected to provide insight into the little-known lives and deaths of blacks in the northern United States.

To increase the burial ground's status, Dodson wants it to be designated a United Nations World Heritage site, like the Statue of Liberty. The Park Service, which nominates landmarks for such consideration, currently has no sites under review.

Park Service spokeswoman Tara Morrison acknowledged there were some disagreements, but said the government is responding to public concerns.

"There are varying opinions on what type of memorial should be on the site," she said. "Some individuals feel that nothing should be placed. And there are others who are interested in putting something special on the place."

On Friday, officials from South Africa gathered at the site to receive soil to take back to Freedom Park in their country and schoolchildren linked hands to form a ring around the site.

"Most people have forgotten or didn't know that this huge area was in fact a burial ground," Dobson said at the ceremony. "Our agenda today is to make the public aware of the enormity of this."

Harrington said her group would like to see a museum of African history built near the site along with a DNA bank — collected from the remains and stored by Howard University — that could be used by descendants to determine their origins.

"It is a very spiritual type of thing," she said. "If we could find one person who could one day go to that DNA bank, and it was determined that that person was a descendent, although we all are, it would just be something that folks would celebrate around the entire globe."

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AN AFRICAN AMERICAN BURIAL GROUND
http://www.africanburialground.com/


The African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan represents the important role and major contribution that enslaved African men, women, and children made to the economy, development, and culture of America, both in the South and North. The Rites of Ancestral Return commemorative ceremony, which began with an Evening Departure Ceremony at Howard University, documented and celebrated the contribution of African Americans as the ancestral remains from the African Burial Ground were returned from Washington, D.C., to New York City. The remains were given a permanent resting-place at the African Burial Ground Memorial Site on October 4, 2003.

In 1991, during the construction of a Federal office building at 290 Broadway in Lower Manhattan, excavators unearthed the largest colonial-era cemetery for enslaved Africans in America. For the previous 200 years, other parts of the five-acre burial ground, where approximately 20,000 Africans were buried, had been disregarded while buildings, streets and parking lots were constructed over the site.

The scientific and historical studies of the remains exhumed in 1991 have documented the important stories of the life, culture and heritage of these enslaved Africans whose labor contributed to the building of New York and other American cities. In accordance with the rich traditions of African culture, the ceremonies for the Rites of Ancestral Return were conducted concluding with the solemn reinterment at the African Burial Ground.

The commemorative ceremony was inclusive and international in scope, and was organized by GSA and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Thousands of interested individuals and dignitaries were in attendance.


FINAL DESIGN PROPOSALS ARE NOW ON VIEW
http://www.africanburialground.com/

Five design teams, selected from a field of sixty-one, have completed their proposals for a Memorial on the site of the African Burial Ground. We invite you to view the designs—either online or at one of six locations throughout New York City--and complete an evaluation form that will help to guide the selection of a memorial for the site.

Their competing designs are now on view through October 8th at these six locations throughout New York City:

MANHATTAN
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
515 Malcolm X Blvd
New York, NY 10037
212-491-2200

290 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
(212) 637-2970

QUEENS
Langston Hughes Community Library & Cultural Center
100-01 Northern Blvd
Corona, New York 11368
(718) 651-1100

STATEN ISLAND
Fort Wadsworth Visitor Center, Bldg. 120,
Staten Island, NY 10305
(718) 354-4500

BRONX
Meister Hall Lobby
Bronx Community College
University Ave & W. 181st St.
Bronx, NY 10453
(718) 289-5100

BROOKLYN
Brooklyn Historical Society
128 Pierrepont Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
(718) 222-4111

Models of the proposed designs can be seen at the Schomburg Center through September 29th. From September 30 through October 8th, they will be on display at 290 Broadway. Response forms are available at each location so that you can tell us what you think of each design and what you believe would constitute an appropriate memorial treatment of the site.

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AN AFRICAN AMERICAN HOMECOMING

The thundering drumbeats of an African drum corps and the sweet harmonies of the choir echoed the emotions of thousands who gathered at Howard University to bid a proper farewell to the remains of the African ancestors. Two tiny mahogany caskets hand-carved in Ghana held the remains of two children, a boy and a girl. Two larger caskets held those of a man and a woman. All four were ushered into Howard’s Rankin Memorial Chapel as a corps of five African drummers, resplendent in sparkling formal dashikis, beat out the announcement of their arrival.

“Even though we can’t call their names, we know them,� said Bernard L. Richardson, the dean of the chapel. “We give thanks for the opportunity to connect with our past and our future. Oh God, he exclaimed, “ you have made these bones live again.�

The four caskets were blessed with holy water and sacred oils during a service designed to give the remains the honor and respect they were never afforded at their first burial centuries ago in the colonial-era cemetery located beyond the edge of the settlement that used to stand on what is now downtown Manhattan. Blacks, most of whom were enslaved, were not allowed to be buried anywhere else.

The Evening Departure Ceremony at Howard included a powerful recitation of the slaves’ story and the hard, tragic journey of their descendants. GSA Administrator Stephen Perry said, “ We celebrate their lives and contributions even more than before because now we know far more about who they are and what they endured. Their legacy is of lasting benefit for all of us and for generations to come�.

Washington was the first stop in the ceremonial journey of the remains to New York. Similar ceremonies were held in Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia and Newark before the remains were placed on a boat that later docked at the very spot in New York where slave ships sailed to port more than 200 years ago

Each of the five cities is historically significant to the role of Africans as colony builders in the northeastern United States.

In Baltimore Wednesday several hundred people gathered at historic Orchard Street Church. The church was once a station on the Underground Railroad. Civil Rights leader Marian Bascom, who once served as minister of one of the largest Black churches in Baltimore, called the ceremonies, �One of the great moments of our times.� Reflecting on the occasion he said, “I’m not too sure that those skeletal remains are not part of me, hidden and forgotten for hundreds of years and now recovered and given a sacred burial.�

Conflicting emotions of joy and sadness were in evidence on the faces of those who watched as the coffins were carried from the Orchard Street Church in a horse-drawn hearse to the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge of Maryland, one of the oldest Black Masonic lodges in the United States. Lt. Governor Michael Steele, the first Black to hold that position in Maryland, greeted them.

About 200 people gathered at Fort Christina State Park near downtown Wilmington later in the day Wednesday, marking the arrival of the remains from Baltimore. Pallbearers dressed in tuxedoes and stepping in time to the beat of rhythmic African drums slowly carried the caskets to a dais where a ritual libation ceremony was performed. Members of the audience called out the names of their ancestors as well as the names of prominent figures in Black history.

Comparing the slaves interred in the African Burial Ground to the victims of the September 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers, Howard Dodson, executive director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, noted that the bodies of an estimated 20,000 other slaves are still buried in a 6-acre tract under the streets of New York City.

“There’s a historical Ground Zero, that’s been there for 200 years,� he said. The Schomburg Center organized the weeklong Rites of Ancestral Return.

The journey to New York continued Thursday with tribute ceremonies at Mother Bethel A.M.E. church in Philadelphia and at Bethany Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey.

Early Friday morning a solemn procession began in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, New Jersey. After prayers had been recited children carried the small wooden box containing the remains of a 4-year old boy onto a waiting State Police boat bound for New York, the final stop in the centuries long journey for the remains. The other three coffins were loaded onto another boat and both left for New York where another ceremony marked their arrival.

Howard Dodson of the Schomburg Center commented,� we hope this will be part of the process of beginning to affirm what African-Americans have done in the history of the city, the state, the country and the Western Hemisphere.�

When the coffins arrived at South and Wall Streets, the site of Colonial New York’s slave market, they were joined up with about a third of the remains on caissons and proceeded up Broadway to the burial ground. After three centuries and 12 years finally the remains of the 419 African Americans were ready to be laid to rest for a second time.

New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, one of the many dignitaries at the arrival ceremony, reminded the crowd that the site had once housed the second largest slave market in America.

“It’s a painful landmark, a reminder of our city’s portion in what the poet Langston Hughes called ‘the American heartbreak’� he said. “ Once the African-American residents of our city were bought and sold on this very spot. So it is fitting that here and now we reverently receive the earthly remains of some of them. As Mayor of New York, I welcome them home.�

The city’s first Black mayor, David Dinkins who was also the mayor in office at the time the remains were discovered, pointed out that the burial ground was located outside 18th-century New York City. “ Two centuries ago, not only could African-Americans not hope to govern New York City,� he said, “they could not hope to be buried in the city limits.�

There were many tears after the ceremony as onlookers marched in solemn step to the measured beat of drums and the clip-clop of horse-drawn hearses carrying the four wooden coffins and more than 300 other coffins up Broadway’s famous Canyon of Heroes in Lower Manhattan to their original burial place north of City Hall.

A 20-hour vigil that began at 1:00pm Friday concluded at 9:00am Saturday heralding the start of the public tribute and re-interment ceremony.

On Saturday morning the long journey of the 419 remains ended with singing, dancing music, prayers, laughter and tears in a final three-hour tribute ceremony led by award-winning poet and civil rights activist, Dr. Maya Angelou. Speaking on behalf of the long dead African Ancestors, she began “ You may bury me in the bottom of Manhattan. I will rise. My people will get me. I will rise out of the huts of history’s shame.�

Actors Cicely Tyson, Phylicia Rashad, Avery Brooks and Delroy Lindo were among the celebrities who also spoke to the cheering crowd before the caskets were lowered into the ground.

Red, black and green flags symbolic of mother Africa dotted the crowd of several thousand people. A sea of color brightened overcast skies and an early autumn drizzle as drummers dressed in kente cloth mingled the heartbeats of the past with the pulse of the present. The vibrant ceremony stood in stark contrast to the harsh, short and often brutal lives led by the first African-Americans.

Veteran civil rights activist, The Rev. Herbert Daughtry made a special plea for divine intervention, calling on the Lord to stop the rain so we, “don’t have to have these umbrellas all over the place.�
It was just after 1:00pm when his prayer appeared to be answered and the weather cleared just in time for the re-interment.

The re-interment, a bittersweet moment, seemed to play out in slow motion bringing a controversial chapter in American history to a close. A Yoruba priest offered blessings and a sacred African prayer as the seven oversized coffins containing the 18th century remains were reverently lowered into the ground and covered in the same place they had been discovered a dozen years earlier.

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