The African Burial Ground: Seventeen Thousand Dead Under City Hall

In the autumn of nineteen ninety-one, construction crews working on a new federal office building in Lower Manhattan hit something unexpected about seventeen feet below the street surface. Bones. Hundreds of them. Then more hundreds. Archaeologists were called. Federal building authorities, initially, were not pleased.

What the excavation had found was the largest and most significant pre-Revolutionary African American archaeological site in North America. Between sixteen twenty-six and seventeen ninety-five, enslaved Africans and free Black New Yorkers had been buried on the northern edge of the colonial city in a cemetery that the eighteenth century called the Negroes Burying Ground. It covered more than six acres. When the colonial city expanded northward, buildings went up over the graves. Streets were laid. Offices rose. The cemetery was forgotten by the city that had built itself on top of it.

The remains of four hundred nineteen individuals were eventually excavated. Historians studying the site's size estimated that between fifteen thousand and seventeen thousand people were interred in the full cemetery, most of them enslaved, their deaths unrecorded in the colonial ledgers that so meticulously documented the property they were considered to be.

This matters because of what it corrects. New York City had the largest enslaved population of any American city north of the Mason-Dixon line. At the time of the American Revolution, more than forty percent of white Manhattan households owned enslaved people. The city's economy ran on enslaved labor through the docks, the households, the skilled trades, the triangular commerce in sugar and rum and human beings. New York State did not fully abolish slavery until eighteen twenty-seven. The harbor celebrated as the world's gateway for immigrants was also a port of entry for the largest forced migration in human history.

The discovery in nineteen ninety-one was not welcomed by everyone with open arms. Federal building authorities initially moved to continue construction. Activists, scholars, and the Black New York community organized and fought. They halted the excavation, demanded respect for the dead, and won a redesign of the federal building. The remains were reinterred with full ceremony in two thousand three, accompanied by representatives of seven African nations.

The National Monument that now marks the site at Duane and Elk Streets in lower Manhattan is a small footprint for a very large story. It marks the burial ground of people who built the city above it and were never once thanked for the labor.