F or a few hours last week, Lower Manhattan traded the noisy clamor of taxis and the chatter of attorneys for drumming, singing and dancing as a throng of people properly put their ancestors to rest after hundreds of years. This was not a mass funeral, but rather the dedication of the African Burial Ground Memorial; the site where in 1991, construction workers discovered the bones of black slaves that had been buried and forgotten beneath the expanding city.
“We are the true children of Africa and today is the beginning of a healing,” said Queen Mother Delois Blakely, founder of Harlem’s New Future Foundation, who shared in the dedication along with poet Maya Angelou and Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Attendees held candles and said prayers in reverence for the dead, whom historians say likely lay countless under office and government buildings sprawled around Lower Manhattan. Excavators have found the bones and teeth of 419 slaves in graves at least 200 years old.
Erica Hawkins, a tour guide from Brooklyn was among those who came to pay their respects at the ceremony. She said the unnamed dead were certainly worth remembering.
“It’s important that we honor the conrtibutions of enslaved Africans,” said Hawkins. “They laid down the foundation for this city.”
