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A round-trip three centuries in the making ended triumphantly in Lower
Manhattan on Saturday October 4, 2003 for the remains of 419
colonial-era enslaved and free African Americans. Under the backdrop of
a gray Manhattan sky, with thousands of New Yorkers looking on, the
remains were ceremonially lowered into the newly dedicated African
Burial Ground, the same place they were discovered a dozen years ago as
the federal government prepared to build an office tower.
The re-interment ceremony, solemn and celebratory, was the culmination
of six days of tribute and celebration that began earlier in the week in
Washington D.C.
The thundering drumbeats of an African drum corps and the sweet
harmonies of the choir echoed the emotions of thousands who gathered at
Howard University to bid a proper farewell to the remains of the African
ancestors. Two tiny mahogany caskets hand-carved in Ghana held the
remains of two children, a boy and a girl. Two larger caskets held those
of a man and a woman. All four were ushered into Howard’s Rankin
Memorial Chapel as a corps of five African drummers, resplendent in
sparkling formal dashikis, beat out the announcement of their arrival.
“Even though we can’t call their names, we know them,” said Bernard L.
Richardson, the dean of the chapel. “We give thanks for the opportunity
to connect with our past and our future. Oh God, he exclaimed, “ you
have made these bones live again.”
The four caskets were blessed with holy water and sacred oils during a
service designed to give the remains the honor and respect they were
never afforded at their first burial centuries ago in the colonial-era
cemetery located beyond the edge of the settlement that used to stand on
what is now downtown Manhattan. Blacks, most of whom were enslaved, were
not allowed to be buried anywhere else.
The Evening Departure Ceremony at Howard included a powerful recitation
of the slaves’ story and the hard, tragic journey of their descendants.
GSA Administrator Stephen Perry said, “ We celebrate their lives and
contributions even more than before because now we know far more about
who they are and what they endured. Their legacy is of lasting benefit
for all of us and for generations to come”.
Washington was the first stop in the ceremonial journey of the remains
to New York. Similar ceremonies were held in Baltimore, Wilmington,
Philadelphia and Newark before the remains were placed on a boat that
later docked at the very spot in New York where slave ships sailed to
port more than 200 years ago
Each of the five cities is historically significant to the role of
Africans as colony builders in the northeastern United States.
In Baltimore Wednesday several hundred people gathered at historic
Orchard Street Church. The church was once a station on the Underground
Railroad. Civil Rights leader Marian Bascom, who once served as minister
of one of the largest Black churches in Baltimore, called the
ceremonies, ”One of the great moments of our times.” Reflecting on the
occasion he said, “I’m not too sure that those skeletal remains are not
part of me, hidden and forgotten for hundreds of years and now recovered
and given a sacred burial.”
Conflicting emotions of joy and sadness were in evidence on the faces of
those who watched as the coffins were carried from the Orchard Street
Church in a horse-drawn hearse to the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge of
Maryland, one of the oldest Black Masonic lodges in the United States.
Lt. Governor Michael Steele, the first Black to hold that position in
Maryland, greeted them.
About 200 people gathered at Fort Christina State Park near downtown
Wilmington later in the day Wednesday, marking the arrival of the
remains from Baltimore. Pallbearers dressed in tuxedoes and stepping in
time to the beat of rhythmic African drums slowly carried the caskets to
a dais where a ritual libation ceremony was performed. Members of the
audience called out the names of their ancestors as well as the names of
prominent figures in Black history.
Comparing the slaves interred in the African Burial Ground to the
victims of the September 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade
Center towers, Howard Dodson, executive director of the Schomburg Center
for Research in Black Culture in New York, noted that the bodies of an
estimated 20,000 other slaves are still buried in a 6-acre tract under
the streets of New York City.
“There’s a historical Ground Zero, that’s been there for 200 years,” he
said. The Schomburg Center organized the weeklong Rites of Ancestral
Return.
The journey to New York continued Thursday with tribute ceremonies at
Mother Bethel A.M.E. church in Philadelphia and at Bethany Baptist
Church in Newark, New Jersey.
Early Friday morning a solemn procession began in the shadow of the
Statue of Liberty at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, New Jersey.
After prayers had been recited children carried the small wooden box
containing the remains of a 4-year old boy onto a waiting State Police
boat bound for New York, the final stop in the centuries long journey
for the remains. The other three coffins were loaded onto another boat
and both left for New York where another ceremony marked their arrival.
Howard Dodson of the Schomburg Center commented,” we hope this will be
part of the process of beginning to affirm what African-Americans have
done in the history of the city, the state, the country and the Western
Hemisphere.”
When the coffins arrived at South and Wall Streets, the site of Colonial
New York’s slave market, they were joined up with about a third of the
remains on caissons and proceeded up Broadway to the burial ground.
After three centuries and 12 years finally the remains of the 419
African Americans were ready to be laid to rest for a second time.
New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, one of the many dignitaries at the
arrival ceremony, reminded the crowd that the site had once housed the
second largest slave market in America.
“It’s a painful landmark, a reminder of our city’s portion in what the
poet Langston Hughes called ‘the American heartbreak’” he said. “ Once
the African-American residents of our city were bought and sold on this
very spot. So it is fitting that here and now we reverently receive the
earthly remains of some of them. As Mayor of New York, I welcome them
home.”
The city’s first Black mayor, David Dinkins who was also the mayor in
office at the time the remains were discovered, pointed out that the
burial ground was located outside 18th-century New York City. “ Two
centuries ago, not only could African-Americans not hope to govern New
York City,” he said, “they could not hope to be buried in the city
limits.”
There were many tears after the ceremony as onlookers marched in solemn
step to the measured beat of drums and the clip-clop of horse-drawn
hearses carrying the four wooden coffins and more than 300 other coffins
up Broadway’s famous Canyon of Heroes in Lower Manhattan to their
original burial place north of City Hall.
A 20-hour vigil that began at 1:00pm Friday concluded at 9:00am Saturday
heralding the start of the public tribute and re-interment ceremony.
On Saturday morning the long journey of the 419 remains ended with
singing, dancing music, prayers, laughter and tears in a final
three-hour tribute ceremony led by award-winning poet and civil rights
activist, Dr. Maya Angelou. Speaking on behalf of the long dead African
Ancestors, she began “ 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.”
Actors Cicely Tyson, Phylicia Rashad, Avery Brooks and Delroy Lindo were
among the celebrities who also spoke to the cheering crowd before the
caskets were lowered into the ground.
Red, black and green flags symbolic of mother Africa dotted the crowd of
several thousand people. A sea of color brightened overcast skies and an
early autumn drizzle as drummers dressed in kente cloth mingled the
heartbeats of the past with the pulse of the present. The vibrant
ceremony stood in stark contrast to the harsh, short and often brutal
lives led by the first African-Americans.
Veteran civil rights activist, The Rev. Herbert Daughtry made a special
plea for divine intervention, calling on the Lord to stop the rain so
we, “don’t have to have these umbrellas all over the place.”
It was just after 1:00pm when his prayer appeared to be answered and the
weather cleared just in time for the re-interment.
The re-interment, a bittersweet moment, seemed to play out in slow
motion bringing a controversial chapter in American history to a close.
A Yoruba priest offered blessings and a sacred African prayer as the
seven oversized coffins containing the 18th century remains were
reverently lowered into the ground and covered in the same place they
had been discovered a dozen years earlier.
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