Unearthing Downtown Manhattan: The African Burial Ground National Monument

“The tiny plot was what had been set aside now to indicate the spot, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the site had been large, some six acres, as far north as present-day Duane Street, and as far south as City Hall Park. Along Chambers Street and in the park itself, human remains were still routinely uncovered. But most of the burial ground was now under office buildings, shops, streets, diners, pharmacies, all  the endless hum of quotidian commerce and government. Into this earth had been interred the bodies of some fifteen to twenty thousand blacks, most of them slaves, but then the land had been built over and the people of the city had forgotten that it was a burial ground.” 

Those are the musings of Julius, the narrator of Teju Cole’s Open City, as he passes a memorial in Downtown Manhattan. The African Burial Ground is considered a national monument of New York, memorializing thousands of Black New Yorkers—many of them enslaved—who died between the 17th and 18th centuries. It is a grisly part of the state’s history, one that almost seems like a bad horror trope. But in reality, there are currently people who are living and working atop concrete grave markers for yet-to-be-found bodies.

The very fact that Manhattan became a hidden burial ground is in itself a terrible piece of history. When the island was first settled by the Dutch and still known as New Amsterdam, it was built with the labor of enslaved people. The Dutch declared conditional freedom to an enslaved group in the 1640s, but refused to allow them to live—or bury their dead—within city limits. Instead, the Black population settled along the margins of New Amsterdam. It is believed that around this time the cemetery was first established in what is now Downtown Manhattan. Although it is thought to have been founded by free Africans, it was not just free Africans who were buried beneath its soil. On just one corner of the graveyard, 419 bodies were exhumed with more than half believed to be enslaved people. There are many lost elements to this tragic story, such as the shift in burials of free Africans to enslaved ones and the transformation of a graveyard into a heavily developed metropolitan block. 

That latter missing piece of the puzzle is what has always bothered me as someone who lives and admires this city. It’s not just the unfree existence and unpeaceful and unequal eternal rest that haunts; what stays with me is how a graveyard spanning six acres becomes covered to begin with, remaining unexposed until the 1990s. It is the epitome of cruel neglect, allowing property to pass from public to private; allowing grave markers to rot; and paving over thousands of human beings in deliberate ignorance. To turn a cemetery to parking lots there had to have been a decision from Manhattan’s people to let the dead who built their city be paved over and to desecrate their final resting place. 

At best guess, there are still potentially thousands of undiscovered graves in Downtown Manhattan. If a mind-blowing 419 bodies could be exhumed from just one corner of a city block—and the graveyard originally spanned six acres, with an estimated 15,000 burials—then one can only imagine how many more are lying under skyscrapers, pedestrian walkways, maintenance lines, and subway tunnels. It’s an uneasy, unpleasant, and frankly unavoidable truth that if you have walked through Downtown Manhattan, you have almost certainly walked over former enslaved people, impoverished colonial paupers dumped into mass graves, and the Lenape. It’s especially unnerving to know that Manhattan, a city so deeply entrenched in the darkest parts of the Atlantic Slave Trade, has so many literal skeletons under its sidewalks.

But what to do with this horrifying information as New Yorkers? To start, we can support the only monument in the memory of those individuals, the African Burial Ground National Monument. Its visitor center provides a link for donations, which are used to maintain the monument and hopefully find ways to exhume more bodies in the future. We can also educate ourselves on the history behind it. Howard University conducted a 2009 research study to analyze burial rites, bone composition, and chemical makeup of the bodies. It concluded some very interesting—albeit disturbing—truths about life for these Black New Yorkers. 

Although this history may be difficult to deal with, it’s an inevitable fact that this city—like so many American cities—has a sordid past built on our forgotten, enslaved forefathers. We do not make amends with our history by hiding it or ignoring its discomfort. Instead we must  find ways to keep it from fading.