The Rites (and Wrongs)
of Ancestral Return

By Karen Juanita Carrillo
SeeingBlack.com Diaspora Writer

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As thousands of New Yorkers marched to the sound of spiritual drumming, the remains of New York City's first Blacks were re-interred on Oct. 4 in the African Burial Ground, now an historical landmark, in Lower Manhattan.

The official re-interment, at the end of a week-long, five city journey for the remains—and more than a decade of dispute with federal officials—was organized by Harlem's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the federal General Services Administration. Termed a celebration of the "Rites of Ancestral Return: Commemorating the Colonial African Heritage," it included varied memorial ceremonies at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Willard W. Allen Masonic Temple in Baltimore, Mother African Union Church in Wilmington, DE, Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church in Philadelphia and Bethany Baptist Church in Newark, NJ.

Vigils, processions and homages at these various sites led to this reburial ceremony. At each of the memorials, the emotion and pain of centuries was expressed by the descendants of once-enslaved Africans. "[I] finally had the chance to be in the presence of and to cry for those who lived through slavery, those who made it possible for us to be here today," said one ceremony participant in Baltimore.

On Friday, Oct. 3, marchers stopped traffic in the Wall Street area as they paraded from South Street Seaport—near where New York's colonial era slave market once stood—to the Foley Square location of the consecrated burial ground, the site from which the buried ancestors were uprooted in 1991 to make way for the construction of a new federal office building. After an overnight vigil, the remains of the 419 colonial era Africans were settled into seven massive crypts where they were finally sealed and reburied.

Dr. Michael L. Blakey, the Howard University anthropologist who directed 12 years of research on the remains, explained in a D.C. press conference that his team of scientists had to reconstruct the skeletons bone by bone. In coffins that had been buried facing east—in the direction of Africa—they discovered fragments of grave offerings and used those, along with historical documents and statistical analysis, to determine that most of those buried were from Western and Central Africa. The bone chemistry of the remains showed that they were from the Asante Kingdom, Benin, Dahomey and the Congo, among other locations.

Because these Africans were considered a "disposable population" they were forced to subsist on a daily diet of corn meal, porridge, lard and bread. Infant mortality was very high among New York's first Blacks, Blakey added, and most who lived until adulthood rarely survived past age 40; only 1.4 percent lived past age 55— while seven to eight times more colonial era Whites lived past age 55.

The issue the burial ground, which archeologists say lies underneath five blocks of federal government-owned land—where New York's City Hall, the U.S. Courthouse and the state Supreme Court proudly sit today—has remained contentious. Although it has always been well-delineated on old maps of the city, the currently designated site—located on Duane St. between Elk and Reade streets.—is said to have been rediscovered during the construction of a federal office building in May 1991. GSA engineers later said that they had not expected that the burial site would still be intact after having been built on from colonial times up though the 19th century. But as construction for the federal building dug deep, the graves of hundreds of African men, women, and children, both enslaved and free, were uncovered. Most were found more than 20 feet below street level.

The African Burial Ground was used from the late 1600s until the late 1700s. At a time when Blacks were forced to live outside of the city's limits, which, at that time, meant just beyond the wall that stood on Wall street , New York City's first African Americans were also forced to bury their dead in cemeteries where no Whites had been buried. Downtown Manhattan's African Burial Ground is said to contain some 20,000 skeletal remains of New York City's first African-Americans.

In 1992 Congress appointed a federal steering committee to fund a $15 million project to study, memorialize, and publicize the African Burial Ground. Blakey has at times been a vocal critic of the GSA and its policies, calling the agency's menial funding of the traditionally Black colleges' researchers a disgrace. "It is simply impossible to do this kind of science without any resources at all," Blakey wrote at one point.

The final DNA analysis is not yet completed, Blakey pointed out, because the General Services Administration still has not delivered all the funds necessary for the Howard University team to complete its work.

The agency's lack of support for the research on the remains and its handling of the memorial ceremonies themselves have been often termed disrespectful. During the initial tribute ceremony at Howard University on Sept. 30, members of the Committee of Descendants of the Afrikan Ancestral Burial Ground and other New Yorkers attending, took the stage to remind agency, the Schomburg,dignitaries from African embassies and local Washington establishments, that the complete excavation of the remains was only halted by the efforts of New York activists.

Brooklyn's Rev. Herbert Daughtry told the Washington gathering, "Brother Sonny Carson said the only way you're going to continue to build this building on the bones of our ancestors is if you put our bones in the ground with them…these are the people who struggled to make this possible!"

In Philadelphia, GSA representatives threatened to leave members of the Committee of Descendants out of their programs if they continued to speak about how difficult it had been to get theremains re-interred.

"The people that really struggled to try to bring this to the attention of the authorities were not mentioned at all [at the New York ceremonies]," attorney Alton Maddox noted on New York's WLIB radio program "Sharp Talk. A three-page listing of New York area and national members of the "Rites of Ancestral Return" host committee failed to include the names of Ollie McLean, Juanita Gore Thomas, Eloise Dicks, Nana Ekow Butweiku, Sonny Carson, Min. Clemson Brown, Calvin McLean, or any of the other activists who initially prevented the continued bulldozing of the burial ground and then kept the issue of reburial in the forefront. "Our ancestors are not resting in peace as a result of the farce perpetrated [on Saturday]," Maddox said.

Former Mayor David Dinkins, who had petitioned GSA to stop the excavations and was turned down, and state Sen. David Patterson who set up a "Task Force for the African Burial Ground" to monitor activity at the site, were part of the New York ceremony but there was no mention of former Congressman Gus Savage, who held hearings in New York City and D.C. to get Congress to pressure GSA to stop the excavations.

"The dialogue between our groups did break down in the 1990s," GSA's Stephen A. Perry admitted at one of the memorials. "But I pray that we have reached a place where we can work together today. …Ultimately, we're here to celebrate and honor all those who traveled from Africa and participated in the building of America."

The re-interment is over, but New York activists are planning their own further celebrations to honor the African Burial Ground.. Many are looking to have formal mention of Sonny Carson, Rep. Savage and Committee of Descendants members in the Interpretive Center located in the lobby of 290 Broadway, the building that uprooted the burial ground.

The Interpretative Center, funded by the General Services Administration, has been termed be an educational center for visitors who want to learn about 17th and 18th century Black life in New York City. But because activists are still reeling from recent encounters with the federal agencies in charge of the burial ground site, they are pushing to have some of their own historical documents and videos available for visitors to the center. They want to make certain that General Services Administration won't be the only organization interpreting what Black life was like for New York's first Africans.

-- October 20, 2003

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