African Burial Ground National Monument in New York City

In the late 1980s, plans were made for the construction of the Ted Weiss Federal Building that would encompass the entire block between Duane, Elk, Reade, and Broadway streets in New York City, which at the time was a parking lot. Standard procedure before any federally-funded construction can commence is to conduct an environmental impact study. This was done in 1989, and in the process a map from 1755 was found that showed that a Negro Burial Ground had once occupied this land over 200 years ago. The cemetery actually extended many blocks beyond the planned construction site, covering roughly six acres in total. Since there had been many buildings on the cemetery property over the years and no graves had ever been found, it was assumed that the cemetery had been moved or destroyed long ago. Nevertheless, it was recommended that a test excavation be conducted at a section of the construction site along Elk and Duane streets. The excavation took place in the summer and fall of 1991, and, surprisingly, in October eleven graves were discovered 25 feet below street level. By January, over 200 graves had been found, half of which were children. Archaeologists were certain that there were thousands of graves in the cemetery.

Up through the end of the American Revolution, the area occupied by the cemetery was outside the New York City limits. Africans could not be buried within the city, so areas such as this were used for their cemeteries. Historical evidence shows that this particular cemetery was used from at least 1690—and possibly from the early 1600s—up until 1794 on property owned by Sara Van Borsum and her descendants.

At the time, a small lake called the Collect Pond bordered New York City and the cemetery. By the 1790s, the lake had become so polluted that it was decided to level the surrounding hills and use the dirt to fill it in. Because the cemetery was situated in a ravine between the hills and the lake, it was subsequently covered over with more than twenty feet of dirt. Protected by this massive layer of earth, new buildings were erected on the land without ever disturbing the graves. As years passed, the Negro Burial Ground was forgotten.

As the excavation continued into 1992, the local African-American community and New York politicians called for a permanent halt to the dig, and that plans for the building be scrapped. Meetings with the General Services Administration (GSA), the federal organization in charge of the project, yielded no satisfactory compromise. The government first offered to reinter the bodies in a public park, donate $250,000 towards a new museum about the burial ground, and place a small marker at the site. However, anything less than a complete shutdown of the construction site would not satisfy the activists. As you can imagine, with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, George Washington himself could have been found in the cemetery and it wouldn’t have prevented the Ted Weiss Federal Building from being built on his grave.

On-site protests and signed petitions finally forced the United States Congress to stop the excavation in October 1992, by which time 419 skeletons had been removed from the cemetery. GSA then created a National Advisory Board to represent all points of view concerning the burial ground, which was now called the African Burial Ground. One of the first decisions was to eventually establish a physical memorial on a portion of the lot pegged for the Weiss Federal Building. However, there was never any doubt that construction on the building would go on as planned.

In April 1993, the National Park Service designated the African Burial Ground as a National Historic Landmark, and in November the excavation site was covered back with dirt and sod and no further exhumations took place. This area would ultimately be the only section on the block not covered by the new Weiss Federal Building, which opened in 1995.

It wasn’t until 1999 that GSA announced a design competition for a physical memorial on the corner of Elk and Duane streets. Sixty-one designs were entered, and in 2002 GSA chose five semifinalists. In June 2004, architect Rodney Leon and his team of consultants was announced as the winner, and the design was unveiled to the public in April 2005.

Research on the exhumed skeletons was conducted at Howard University in Washington, D. C. With the conclusion of the study in the summer of 2003, it was decided to reinter the bones in seven crypts located within the excavated area of the original burial ground. The ceremony took place on October 3, 2003. When visiting the memorial, these seven mounds are clearly visible.