CVOL Staff

Boston: October 6th, 2003

After three centuries and 12 years the skeletal remains of over 400 free and enslaved African-Americans were laid to rest for the second time in Lower Manhattan, NY.Historic Parting Ways Cemetery in Plymouth, Massachusetts

Last Saturday, October 4th in a moment that was both joyous and bitter all at once, the 18th-century remains were lowered into the ground and covered, in the same place where they were discovered a dozen years ago as the federal government prepared to build an office tower. The re-internment followed a special tribute and memorial ceremonies in six cities and the re-internment of 419 coffins containing the remains of men, women and children to the African Burial Ground site in New York City.

The U.S. General Services Administration partnered with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to develop and conduct the tribute ceremonies and reburial. Under the direction of the Schomburg Center, the “Rites of Ancestral Return - Commemorating the Colonial African Heritage” consisted of a week long series of events.

The ceremonies commenced on September 30, in Washington, D.C., and proceed to Baltimore, Maryland; Wilmington, Delaware; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Newark, New Jersey; and then concluded in New York City on October 4, 2003.

The observance included a procession up the Canyon of Heroes in Lower Manhattan and also brought a symbolic close to an especially tumultuous chapter in the city's racial history. The joy, those close to the project agree, will come from seeing the belated celebration of lives and history once forgotten. The bitterness, they say, stemmed from the fact they had to be reburied at all.

"It was the considered judgment of virtually every African-American I knew that they shouldn't have been disturbed in the first place," said Howard Dodson, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The discovery of the remains, in a huge Colonial-era cemetery, have offered anthropologists a rare glimpse into the lives of the first black Americans in New York, which at one point had more slaves than any other city in the country besides Charleston, S.C. Some skeletons, for instance, were found with holes in the collar bones, a sign that the person was forced to carry very heavy loads.

Sign at Parting Ways Site
African Burial Ground is similar to New Guinea Settlement project here in Plymouth, MA. Pictured above and hardly known by anyone, Historic Parting Ways Cemetery is the resting place of four Revolutionary War veterans that were granted their freedom and a parcel of land at the birth of the nation. The colony of New Guinea as originally known by Town of Plymouth officials was a small town where African Americans and Pilgrims co-existed peacefully. Fifteen of the 106 acres of land has been set aside for the construction of an African American & Cape Verdean Museum of History.