NEW YORK—The African Burial Ground, a national monument in Lower Manhattan, is celebrating 20 years since the rediscovery of the human remains that it stands in remembrance of. Films, workshops, presentations, ceremony re-enactments, and more will be held through Saturday.
“For me, today is like the ancestor’s birthday,” Tamika Guishard, 30, said on Tuesday. “We don’t really know the birthdates of those buried here so it’s kind of like a rebirth in a sense.”
The memorial at Duane and Elk streets was an active construction site for a federal building in 1991. When construction workers kept on discovering human remains, archeologists got involved, uncovering 419 burials. After a vocal campaign by local leaders, the plans for the federal building were adjusted to accommodate space for a memorial and a visitor center.
The memorial was completed in 2003. By that time, the remains and accompanying objects had been studied at Howard University in Washington, D.C. All of the remains were then placed in mahogany coffins hand-carved in Ghana. The coffins traveled to New York as part of a six-day funeral procession, which stopped in Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Newark, and Jersey City.
“One of the wonders of the memorial is that it is able to symbolically tell so much of the story of the diaspora. It speaks to the ways that Africans brought with them,” said Rasul T., a volunteer guide at the memorial.
“It is not unusual for the experience of the memorial...to bring the visitors to tears,” he said.
