New Visitor Center Opens for African Burial Ground Monument
The newly opened Visitor Center at the African Burial Ground National Monument—so well designed, written and researched—is a difficult place to visit.
Housed inside a federal office building at Duane Street and Broadway, and next to the African Burial Ground, the exhibit is a painful reconstruction of the lives of many African-Americans who lived and died in the days of slavery.
Along one wall, from floor to ceiling, are 419 photographs of every grave and skeleton that was found at the site of the 17th- and 18th-century cemetery, discovered in 1991 during excavation for the federal building. Each photo is labeled by sex and approximate age.
Archeologists carefully removed the remains, bone by bone, and scientists at Howard University spent seven years analyzing them.
After hundreds of years, the bones still yielded evidence of servitude. Over half of the bodies exhumed suffered from periostitis, a painful condition often brought on by physical strain and worsened by malnutrition. Even the bones of some children, many of whom were slaves, and women, who labored for long hours doing difficult housework, showed signs of excessive work.
As the exhibit points out, these Africans helped build New York City, and the discovery of the burial ground has guided a renewed study of their contributions. It has also revealed their trials.
Across the last wall of the exhibit are written the words of Maya Angelou:
“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.”
That shame is here, for all to see.
The Visitor Center is open Tue–Sat, 9 am–5 pm. Entrance at 290 Broadway, bet. Duane and Reade Sts. nps.gov/afbg.
By April Koral