From the Editor

Personal visits to cemeteries and burial grounds evoke both emotions and memories. But these final resting places are also windows into our national history. The heroes buried at Arlington tell us the story of our nation’s wars while neglected potter’s fields remind us of the inequities of social class. In this issue of History Now we take a close look at the African American cemeteries, graveyards, and burial grounds that help us understand a past many Americans have forgotten.

In “The New York African Burial Ground,” Professor Edna Greene Medford shows us how the unearthing of this “Negroes Burying Ground” challenged the popular belief that slavery was a southern, agriculturally based institution. Instead, Medford points out, slavery could be found throughout the country, north and south, from its inception until the end of the Civil War. The burial ground was discovered by accident when construction was undertaken on a new federal building in New York City. Archeologists estimate as many as 10,000 to 15,000 enslaved and free African Americans were buried there, but over the years this site was desecrated by medical students seeking cadavers and by the dumping of industrial waste. Controversy over how to handle this sacred space and its human remains arose soon after the site was discovered. Descendants wanted a voice in who would study the excavated remains and in how their ancestors would be memorialized. Ultimately, Howard University led the team of archaeologists, biologists, historians, and geneticists whose work, Medford recounts, produced vital information on the health and work patterns of the city’s Black population in earlier centuries. The burial ground is now on the National Register of Historic Places and is designated a National Historic Landmark. A memorial stands in honor of these free and enslaved men and women who contributed much to New York’s history.

In “African American Burial Sites in New England from Colonial Times through the Early Twentieth Century,” Glenn A. Knoblock, like Medford, reminds us that slavery was not an exclusively southern institution. Evidence of a Black presence even in small New England communities can be found in burial grounds and cemeteries. White slaveowners created segregated burial areas on their property. Most of those that remain can be found in Rhode Island, the largest slaveholding colony and state in the region. Here, simple fieldstone markers often did not identify the people buried beneath them. Records for these African American burial grounds rarely exist. Outside of Rhode Island, where slaveholding often meant one or two Black men or women in a household, African Americans were sometimes buried in family cemeteries, without an identifying marker. In Boston, the enslaved were buried close to their masters, sometimes even within the family tomb. More often, Black bodies were consigned to a far corner or to a segregated space. The most prominent example of an early segregated space, Knoblock notes, is God’s Little Acre Burial Ground in Newport, Rhode Island. Here, inscribed tombstones, many carved by an enslaved man named Pompe Stevens, provide the identities of many of the 250 people interred there. Knoblock explains that many of the African American burial spaces have been lost or deliberately destroyed, while others have been reclaimed and commemorated, such as the African Burying Ground Memorial Park in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Ric Murphy turns our attention to Arlington in “Our National Cemetery and Its Honored Dead: The African American History of Arlington.” Murphy begins with the Black refugees who made their way to Fort Monroe in the early days of the Civil War, encouraged by the refusal of the commanding officer there, General Benjamin Butler, to return them to southern slaveholders. During the course of the war, enslaved Blacks from Maryland and Virginia took advantage of the chaos to find refuge in Washington, DC. That city lacked the resources or institutions to care for the influx of sick, wounded, and maimed soldiers and refugee African Americans. Not surprisingly, disease spread within the congested contraband camps and the military hospitals. During a smallpox outbreak, Black refugees were relocated to Robert E. Lee’s abandoned plantation, but thousands of those in the DC area died of diphtheria and typhoid. The city’s cemeteries filled to capacity, leading authorities to create a burial ground at Arlington. Anger at what northern generals like Montgomery Meigs considered Robert E. Lee’s apostasy led Meigs to turn the Lee plantation into a burial ground for Union dead. Here, members of the United States Colored Troops were also laid to rest, in Section 27. By 1867, more than 3500 African Americans were buried in Section 27. The names of many were unknown. Some African Americans chose freedom names like Abraham Lincoln, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, inscribed on their tombstones.

“Memorializing the Gravesites of Twentieth-Century African Americans” by Professor Karla F. C. Holloway offers us an elegiac tribute to the African American men and women of the last century. Offering a personal account of discovery, Holloway takes us through the cemeteries where these dead are interred. Her honor roll is a dramatic reminder of the contributions to American history of figures like the abolitionist Harriet Tubman, the educator Booker T. Washington, the author Richard Wright, the jazz vocalist Billie Holiday, and many other African Americans who helped to reform our society and enrich our cultural heritage. Holloway recounts leaving a flower at the gravesites of those she wanted to memorialize in both American and foreign cemeteries she visited. As she names these men and women, she calls on us to acknowledge the vast and varied talents of people who struggled to make their voices heard.

In the final essay, “‘What We Leave the Earth’: The African Burial Ground in New York City,” David Mills returns us to the site that began this issue. Mills takes us back to 1991 when the construction of a new government building led to the discovery of the cemetery two centuries after it had been closed. The General Services Administration, eager to complete the construction, was cavalier in its treatment of the site, leading Black New Yorkers to protest. Ultimately, it took the intervention of a former US congressman and President George W. Bush to ensure that the remains of the deceased were handled with care. These were finally re-interred beside the new federal building, and the GSA eventually financed the construction of a monument. No one knows how many bodies remain beneath the federal office building. Mills recounts his personal quest to honor the thousands of souls buried between 1712 and 1795 in the cemetery. Neither he nor anyone could find the names of these people or the dates when they lived. Nevertheless, Mills focuses on recreating the experiences of these long-ago Black New Yorkers in his poetry. In his poems, he urges readers to help the bones speak by asking them questions. He imaginatively reconstructs the lives of Black chimney sweeps, cooks, and others. Finally, he confronts the historical oppression of Black New Yorkers, including those who were burned at the stake and hanged after what White authorities called the 1741 Slave Conspiracy and the 1788 Doctors’ Riot by medical students eager to rob the graves of Black bodies. Mills ends his essay by describing a classroom exercise in which he encourages his students to examine burial photos and write about them.

Taken together, these essays provide excellent examples of the ways in which material culture—that is, physical spaces, objects, and beings—holds the keys to our national past.

This issue of History Now, like all previous ones, is enriched with related essays, videos, spotlighted primary sources from the Gilder Lehman Collection, and illustrations. The issue’s special feature is a stirring book trailer, available on YouTube, for Section 27 and Freedman’s Village in Arlington National Cemetery: The African American History of America’s Most Hallowed Ground by contributor Ric Murphy and his co-author Timothy Stephens.

Nicole and I hope that you are thriving in the midst of the spring semester, and that you will find this issue of History Now to be a valuable resource in your teaching and research. We look forward to bringing you the next issue of History Now in Summer 2022.

Carol Berkin, Editor
Presidential Professor of History, Emerita, Baruch College & The Graduate Center, CUNY

Nicole Seary, Associate Editor, History Now, and Senior Editor, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History