In 1697, New York City instituted “mortuary apartheid,” which prohibited Black people from burying their loved ones in churchyards across lower Manhattan. The Black community, free and enslaved, was forced to bury its dead on a desolate piece of land outside the city limits. Historians estimate that this burial ground, in use from the mid-1690s to 1795, contained the remains of between ten thousand and twenty thousand free and enslaved Black people—the earliest and largest African burial ground in the country. At the end of the eighteenth century, the burial ground closed. And as the city
...more
