Many New Yorkers can cite chapter and verse about the African Burial Ground National Monument in downtown Manhattan near City Hall, but only a few know about the burial grounds and segregated Black cemeteries scattered throughout New York City’s boroughs.
Fortunately, we have Mary French, who has been tirelessly compiling information about the historic sites with the aim of memorializing them.
Locations such as the African Burial Ground National Monument at the Ted Weiss Federal Building on Broadway can be traced back to the Colonial era. There were 419 skeletons of enslaved people exhumed and reburied there in 1991. It is considered one of the oldest and largest of the Black burial grounds in the city.
Since the excavation and renovation around the monument, it has received a steady flow of visitors, but less attention is given to the Johnson Burial Ground site in Bayside, Queens, which is one of the smallest and most obscure burial sites.
As French notes in her research, it is located 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.” More visible and accessible is the New Lots Burial Ground in East New York, Brooklyn, replete with street signs, a memorial plaque on Livonia Ave. and very big plans for the near future.
The Brooklyn Public Library is touting “a transformational vision” for the New Lots Library branch, which features a new library to “honor the site’s history as a formerly-unacknowledged African Burial Ground, and celebrate African-American culture.” It calls the major plans an opportunity 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 architecture firms, the new 25,000 square-foot library will feature more public and program space for all age groups, separate floors for child and adult services, new public exhibition areas, a music room, expanded community meeting spaces and a separate New Lots Library Adult Learning Center “where adults can obtain their high school equivalency diploma and take classes in literacy, citizenship preparation and more,” in addition to “significant outdoor areas, viewing terraces” and a “landscaped plaza surrounding the library.”
Construction is scheduled to start in fall of 2025 and the site is scheduled to reopen in 2028, with the library staff providing services and programs during the construction. This effort to recognize a “formerly-unacknowledged African Burial Ground” reflects the tireless efforts of French and her New York City Cemetery Project.
Armed with master’s degrees in anthropology and library science, French has visited 70 cemeteries and burial grounds so far, and she plans to add more sites to her registry.
“I’ve always enjoyed visiting cemeteries, for the stories they tell and for their natural and artistic beauty,” feature about her NYC Cemetery Project blog on the “Boroughs of the Dead” website.” “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 said.
While anticipating the publishing of her book, she has created an extensive blog at the New York City Cemetery Project website that has a proliferation of narratives, images and information for inquiring minds that spans all five boroughs.
In Brooklyn, the Cemetery Project tours begin with a 17th-century history of slavery mirroring the lower Manhattan experience for enslaved Africans. Brooklyn, which provided vast amounts of produce, also witnessed the largest burial of slaves and later free people of African descent. Many of the Black burial sites were segregated from their owners or white neighbors in the Flatbush Dutch Reformed Church’s cemetery.
Circumstances here are very similar to the segregation in the Reformed Church burials in East Harlem, where underneath the Metropolitan Transportation Authority facility on 126th Street Depot is the Harlem African Burial Ground. Thanks to the indefatigable work of the Harlem African Burial Ground Initiative (HAGBI), helmed by the Rev. Dr. Patricia Singletary of the Elmendorf Reformed Church and former City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, the history of the Harlem burial ground has been widely disseminated.
Two years ago in the Bronx, members of the Hunts Point Slave Burial Ground Project and students from the Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School and PS 48 — the Joseph Rodman Drake School — hosted a collaborative event focused on connecting, learning and remembering. They gathered to honor their collective ancestors, mainly those resting in peace within the Enslaved People’s Burial Ground.
The site at Joseph Rodman Drake Park & Enslaved African Burial Ground — located at Oak Point Ave., Drake Park South, Longfellow Ave. and Hunts Point Ave. — was called the Hunts Point Slave Burial Ground and was forgotten to history until it was designated a city landmark in 2023. The site has since drawn considerable attention with the help of the Hunts Point Slave Burial Ground Project and its supporters.
The city’s Landmarks Commission 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 site of noted white poet Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820), PS 48’s namesake, is located 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,” said Maria Torres-Springer, deputy mayor for Housing, Economic Development 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.”
Much like the other boroughs, Staten Island has multiple African burial grounds; the most notable is the Sandy Ground Cemetery in Rossville. According to a Landmarks Conservancy report, there are more than 500 unmarked graves at the Sandy Ground cemetery, which was home to the oldest continuously inhabited Black settlement in the U.S.
The Sandy Ground Historical Society Museum and its annual festival celebrate of Black history, culture and freedom. The museum is also chartered by the New York State Department of Education to bring education about and awareness of Sandy Ground to adults and children through guided tours, exhibits and interactive activities, including arts, crafts and lectures.
Beginning with Black History Month in 2023, the museum’s organizers have been untiring in their efforts to alert the Staten Island community and the city about the need for funds to preserve the history and legacy of Sandy Ground. Sandy Ground Cemetery faces problems common to all the burial sites — the challenge of protecting and preserving the locations and passing the torch to the next generation. Abandonment, neglect and vandalism endanger the gravesites, and must be dealt with to preserve and properly memorialize them.