Many New Yorkers can cite chapter and verse concerning the African Burial Floor Nationwide Monument in downtown Manhattan close to Metropolis Corridor, however just a few know concerning the burial grounds and segregated Black cemeteries scattered all through New York Metropolis’s boroughs.
Fortuitously, now we have Mary French, who has been tirelessly compiling details about the historic websites with the goal of memorializing them.
Areas such because the African Burial Floor Nationwide Monument on the Ted Weiss Federal Constructing on Broadway may be traced again to the Colonial period. There have been 419 skeletons of enslaved individuals exhumed and reburied there in 1991. It’s thought of one of many oldest and largest of the Black burial grounds within the metropolis.
Harlem Burial Floor Process Power co-Chair Rev. Patricia Singletary (middle) consecrates stays discovered at 126th St. and Second Ave. in East Harlem. The reverend is joined by job drive members former New York Metropolis Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito (r.), and Sharon Wilkins (l.). (New York Metropolis Financial Growth Company)
For the reason that excavation and renovation across the monument, it has obtained a gradual circulation of tourists, however much less consideration is given to the Johnson Burial Floor web site in Bayside, Queens, which is without doubt one of the smallest and most obscure burial websites.
As French notes in her analysis, it’s situated on “a small hill tucked between a section of the Long Island [Vanderbilt] Motor Parkway Trail and the apartment buildings of the Alley Pond Owners Corp.” Extra seen and accessible is the New Heaps Burial Floor in East New York, Brooklyn, replete with road indicators, a memorial plaque on Livonia Ave. and really huge plans for the close to future.
A 1905 photograph of a Bronx African burial floor that dates to the early 18th century. Immediately, it’s situated in Joseph Rodman Drake Park. (Obtained by Day by day Information)
The Brooklyn Public Library is touting “a transformational vision” for the New Heaps Library department, which encompasses a new library to “honor the site’s history as a formerly-unacknowledged African Burial Ground, and celebrate African-American culture.” It calls the most important plans a chance to “create a space that will be a hub for knowledge, remembrance, and community.”
Designed by the Boston-based MASS Design Group and Manhattan’s Marble Fairbanks structure companies, the brand new 25,000 square-foot library will function extra public and program house for all age teams, separate flooring for little one and grownup companies, new public exhibition areas, a music room, expanded group assembly areas and a separate New Heaps Library Grownup Studying Middle “where adults can obtain their high school equivalency diploma and take classes in literacy, citizenship preparation and more,” along with “significant outdoor areas, viewing terraces” and a “landscaped plaza surrounding the library.”
Development is scheduled to begin in fall of 2025 and the positioning is scheduled to reopen in 2028, with the library employees offering companies and packages through the development. This effort to acknowledge a “formerly-unacknowledged African Burial Ground” displays the tireless efforts of French and her New York Metropolis Cemetery Mission.
An artist’s rendering of the outside of the renovated New Heaps Library Department, which is because of be accomplished in 2028. (MASS Design Group & Marble Fairbanks Architects)
Armed with grasp’s levels in anthropology and library science, French has visited 70 cemeteries and burial grounds to this point, and she or he plans so as to add extra websites to her registry.
“I’ve always enjoyed visiting cemeteries, for the stories they tell and for their natural and artistic beauty,” function about her NYC Cemetery Mission weblog on the “Boroughs of the Dead” web site.” “When I moved to New York City, I began exploring the city, coming across various cemeteries and learning about ones that had been removed or built over. I’m very much a ‘why?’ person; always curious about why things are the way they are, and I started wondering why some cemeteries were preserved and others lost, who are these people that are buried in this cemetery, and why are they were buried here and not somewhere else. … I couldn’t find a good book that really had the information I was looking for, so I started doing the research myself with the intention of writing my own book someday,” she stated.
Whereas anticipating the publishing of her guide, she has created an intensive weblog on the New York Metropolis Cemetery Mission web site that has a proliferation of narratives, photographs and data for inquiring minds that spans all 5 boroughs.
In Brooklyn, the Cemetery Mission excursions start with a Seventeenth-century historical past of slavery mirroring the decrease Manhattan expertise for enslaved Africans. Brooklyn, which supplied huge quantities of produce, additionally witnessed the biggest burial of slaves and later free individuals of African descent. Lots of the Black burial websites had been segregated from their homeowners or white neighbors within the Flatbush Dutch Reformed Church’s cemetery.
Circumstances listed below are similar to the segregation within the Reformed Church burials in East Harlem, the place beneath the Metropolitan Transportation Authority facility on 126th Road Depot is the Harlem African Burial Floor. Due to the indefatigable work of the Harlem African Burial Floor Initiative (HAGBI), helmed by the Rev. Dr. Patricia Singletary of the Elmendorf Reformed Church and former Metropolis Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, the historical past of the Harlem burial floor has been extensively disseminated.
Two years in the past within the Bronx, members of the Hunts Level Slave Burial Floor Mission and college students from the Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom Excessive Faculty and PS 48 — the Joseph Rodman Drake Faculty — hosted a collaborative occasion centered on connecting, studying and remembering. They gathered to honor their collective ancestors, primarily these resting in peace throughout the Enslaved Folks’s Burial Floor.
The location at Joseph Rodman Drake Park & Enslaved African Burial Floor — situated at Oak Level Ave., Drake Park South, Longfellow Ave. and Hunts Level Ave. — was known as the Hunts Level Slave Burial Floor and was forgotten to historical past till it was designated a metropolis landmark in 2023. The location has since drawn appreciable consideration with the assistance of the Hunts Level Slave Burial Floor Mission and its supporters.
The town’s Landmarks Fee wrote in 2023, “The Joseph Rodman Drake Park and Enslaved People’s Burial Ground is a New York City Park containing two colonial-era cemeteries: the Hunt-Willett-Leggett Cemetery for those descended from, and associated with, these three early settler families; and an enslaved people’s cemetery, for those forced to labor for these families.” The burial web site of famous white poet Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820), PS 48’s namesake, is situated there.
“This designation is a clear illustration of the dignity and respect we must pay to all people who are part of our city’s history, including at this location in the heart of the Hunts Point Peninsula,” stated Maria Torres-Springer, deputy mayor for Housing, Financial Growth and Workforce. “The Landmarks Preservation Commission continues to fulfill its pledge to achieve representation that reflects the diversity of our city through equitable and careful consideration of worthy buildings and places throughout this great city through its establishment of historic districts and individual landmarks in places that have much less representation, for which I am so appreciative.”
Very similar to the opposite boroughs, Staten Island has a number of African burial grounds; probably the most notable is the Sandy Floor Cemetery in Rossville. In response to a Landmarks Conservancy report, there are greater than 500 unmarked graves on the Sandy Floor cemetery, which was house to the oldest repeatedly inhabited Black settlement within the U.S.
The Sandy Floor Historic Society Museum and its annual pageant have a good time of Black historical past, tradition and freedom. The museum can be chartered by the New York State Division of Training to carry schooling about and consciousness of Sandy Floor to adults and kids via guided excursions, displays and interactive actions, together with arts, crafts and lectures.
Starting with Black Historical past Month in 2023, the museum’s organizers have been untiring of their efforts to alert the Staten Island group and town concerning the want for funds to protect the historical past and legacy of Sandy Floor. Sandy Floor Cemetery faces issues widespread to all of the burial websites — the problem of defending and preserving the areas and passing the torch to the subsequent technology. Abandonment, neglect and vandalism endanger the gravesites, and should be handled to protect and correctly memorialize them.
