Remembering Slavery in New York City

I found this article on BBC online, it discusses the 1991 archaelogical find of a 18th century "Negro burial ground" in lower Manhattan, New York. To just provide a bit of contextual information on the the 1991 find, the burial was closed in 1790 and covered by roads and buildings throughout the 19th and 20th century. The burial, which was "discovered" by construction workers and archaeologists, contained as many as twenty-thousand African Americans. The skeletons' conditions spoke to their lived realities as enslaved persons conditioned to heavy labor, overwork, malnutrition, and disease. Renamed in 1993 as the "African Burial Ground," the site has sparked much debate and controversy as it reveals, to many, the ways in which New York's early black history and strong relationship to slave labor has been forgotten. Using Marita Sturken's conceptualization of forgetting as an active process, I wondered when reading the article how the erased burial functions at a literal and figuartive level.I found when reading the BBC article, that much of the controversy revolves around a sense of injustice that many Afican Americans feel over the erasure of their ancestor's place witin the constructed memory of New York. Slavery, as the burial's existence reveals, disrupts the common linear narrative construction of New York that pivots on the cultural memory of Ellis island with the arrival of European immigrants. The site, as the article reveals will be commemorated through the construction of a granite monument designed by Rodney Leon. The marker is intended to mark the place of the burial. The entry to the monument will be titled the "Door of no return," thus paralelling the sites existence in Gora island, and elsewhere in the Transatlantic world. For those interested, BBC provides links to a number of other articles related to this subject as well as the slave trade's memory. To receive additional information on New York's history with slavery I would suggest reading Leslie Harris' (a professor at Emory) "In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7031142.stm