MOTHER JONES: Ground Zero's Slave Graves

[kpete]

Ground Zero's Slave Graves

— By Jen Phillips
| Wed Aug. 25, 2010 4:32 PM PDT

— Slave register from Flickr user Wofford College via Creative Commons.

The outrage about the "ground zero mosque" has turned very ugly, as this video of this recent protest shows. People are calling Mohammed a pig. A New York City cab driver was stabbed today after his passenger asked him if he was Muslim. But I find the righteous outrage of those contending the former World Trade Center site is "hallowed ground" amusing, because they have no idea just how right they are. Before the World Trade Center was even designed (with Islamic architectural elements, incidentally), the ground was indeed sacrosanct: The bones of some 20,000 African slaves are buried 25 feet below Lower Manhattan. As at least 10 percent of West African slaves in America were Muslims, it's not out of bounds to extrapolate that ground zero itself was built on the bones of at least a few Muslim slaves. That is to say, hallowed Muslim ground.

For some time, activists, historians, and city officials have been working together to excavate and preserve the bones of the slaves buried under present-day lower Manhattan. A recent excavation of a 14,000 square foot section of the six-acre burial ground found that 92 percent of the 419 skeletons were of African descent, and 40 percent were children under 12. The bones of the 419 slaves were eventually reinterred.

African slaves couldn't be buried in New York City itself, so they were put to rest along the city's then-northern border, near present-day Chambers Street. The exact borders of the burial ground are fuzzy, and experts say that without test digs, they won't be able to tell how far it extends. The area they've excavated so far ends just a block or two from ground zero, but with the huge number of African slaves that lived and died in New Amsterdam, I find it hard to believe the burial grounds didn't extend further.

At any rate, some of the slaves' belongings were definitely at ground zero: About 100 boxes of artifacts from the African graves were stored at 6 WTC, which was crushed by the North Tower on 9/11, but thankfully archivists were able to recover them. A few of the items were strings of blue beads found buried with the slaves...which some think could be Islamic prayer beads.

more:
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/08/ground-zero-was-built-graves-slaves
http://www.heritagepreservation.org/news/WTC6.htm

http://www.africanburialground.gov/ABG_Main.htm
http://www.africanburialground.gov/ABG_History.htm

[Bluerthanblue]

1. interesting facts.

Thanks for posting this. I'd been looking for the history of what pre-dated the WTC and couldn't find much of substance.

:hi:

[blaze]

2. I had no idea!

Very interesting.

[MichiganVote]

3. K&R for the sake of the American bigots in NYC and elsewhere.

[Wilms]

4. k&r n/t

[uppityperson]

5. k&r

[Number23]

6. The first post in GD I've rec'd in about 3 days. This is a hell of a find

Thanks for posting.

[butterfly77]

7. Finally,I have said this ,..

for a weeks now. I saw a documentary about this years ago.

Kick&Recommended..

[Historic NY]

8. Very good find...wandering around the area one can find many early..

things hidden and unexpalined. The courthouse site in the city uneartheren a very large AA burial site..a courthouse build in Orange County at Newburgh also came up with a AA burial ground forgotten by many but known by a few.

How soon people forget!!

[Bryn]

9. Great Find! I am going to read everything now.

Thank you! K&R

[Withywindle]

10. Wow! This is amazing, thank you for posting it.

K & R


There was also an AA cemetery where Washington Square Park is now too. Victims of a yellow fever epidemic in the early 19th century were also buried there. There are about 20,000 people still buried right under the park!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Square_Park

[AuntPatsy]

11. I will use this information wisely, thank you for sharing it..I had no idea

[blackspade]

12. Suck on that Fundi Bigots!

People with no grasp of history seem to somehow end up running things.
Douche-bags

[nofurylike]

13. wow. thank you for posting that, kpete! important!! nt

[Fire1]

14. K&R

[Altoid_Cyclist]

15. This reminded me of an episode of The History Detectives.

It was fascinating in that I never realized how much land had been given to the AA population in NYC only to have it basically stolen back from them.

If you haven't heard the story before, it is very interesting to see that the Native Americans weren't the only ones to have Manhattan stolen from them.

Episode 10, 2005: 1667 Land Grant, Fairfax, Virginia

Tukufu: Our final story takes us back to a time when African Americans owned some of the choicest real estate in the new world. December, 1609. Henry Hudson, a British sea captain in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, is searching for a trading route to the Orient. At the gateway to North America, he stumbles upon a great island in a mighty, natural harbor. The settlement of New Amsterdam gives the Dutch a toehold in North America. But much of the colonists’ labor came from imported Africans. Those enslaved men and women cleared the land and laid the foundations of the urban community that would one day become New York City. Mark Mitchell, a collector from Fairfax, Virginia, has a 1667 document which he believes tells how some of those slaves fought for their freedom and won land, some 200 years before the Civil War.
Mark Mitchell: I remember going to the library when I was only eight years old and getting hooked on history. When I first saw the land deed, it just sent chills throughout my body. An early-American document pertaining to a free person of color, in what is now New York City, was just extraordinary to me.


Rest of transcript here:

http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/pdf/310_landgrant.pdf

[blaze]

17. That was a fastinating read! n/t

[Altoid_Cyclist]

22. It just stunned me when I saw it on TV.

I've been out of High School for a reaaaaal long time, but I know that we were never taught this in school.

[me b zola]

16. K&R

[Angry Dragon]

18. Hallowed Muslim Ground

[handmade34]

19. a must read

we are realizing more and more that most of our problems are ignorance (willful and otherwise)

[BrklynLiberal]

20. Damn facts!!

There were slave graves discovered in lower Manhattan when they started to build the Federal office building.

They created see-thru covered openings so that you could look down into the locations of where the graves and artifacts were found.
and, of course, continued with the construction...

http://www.lowermanhattan.info/about/history/did_you_know/did_you_know_that_68309.aspx

During the preliminary construction phase of a federal office building at 290 Broadway in 1991, workers discovered the remains of more than 400 Africans stacked in wooden boxes just 16 to 28 feet below street level. Construction on what was to become the U.S. General Services Commission building was halted immediately, and a subsequent archeological investigation unearthed the remnants of a five- to six-acre African burial ground used throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.

Enslaved Africans began arriving on the shores of the colony of New Amsterdam as early as 1626, and the area known today as New York City was one of the largest slave trading centers -- second only to Charleston, South Carolina -- throughout the colonial period.

The African Burial Ground, though, wasn't created until the early 1700s, when Trinity Church banned all Africans from its cemetery. The ban left Africans relegated to a deserted area, then more than a mile outside the city limit, to bury their dead. Over time, the grounds became a sacred place for the African community.
<snip>

[AikidoSoul]

21. Incredibly interesting and timely information. Thank you!

This should be published widely. Please everyone -- get this out there. What a find!

[Vinca]

23. Can anyone get this info to the Beckerhead rally?

Exploding heads would make good TV.

[Gaedel]

24. Maybe a bit of hyperbole

I believe there is an "slave cemetery" in NYC.

I do have trouble with the 20,000 number in the same way I have trouble with the "tens of millions" who died on the voyage to the United States (13 million slaves left Africa, 11 million landed in the new world, only 500,000 landed in British North America).

I also doubt the figure of 10% Muslims given the dynamics of slave raiding in Africa to support the slave trade.

Hugh Thomas' 1997 book "The Slave Trade" has extensive documentation on the number of slaves transported, their place of origin, and their eventual destinations in the western hemisphere make the probability that 20,000 "slave graves" existed in Lower Manhatten seems miniscule.