There is a dishonesty about the fourth of July I've sensed since my late teens. I was a prolific reader of a variety of subjects, so my sense did not come by accident. It came through thought, reason and deducing this and that.
The bone I pick with the 4th of July is its use and glorification of denial. The willingness to gloss over subjects and people is and has always been acceptable in our culture. It is not a strength. It is not a revelation. It is a simple fact. Denial is used as a historical tool to establish the myths of the dream of who and what we'd like the U.S. to be. There is a lot of internal dialogue that supports this tendency and I am afraid and annoyed that the stance artist Nona Faustine took posing nude at slave marketing sites is a profound indictment and an act of power more powerful because she is as naked as she would be if she were on those wood stages being oogled, fondled and sold.
The easily discovered information about the New York slave trade will never reach the surface of the nation's consciousness. So what is our obligation now that we have this memory?
I say learn and tell. Learn and tell. - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 7.5.15
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The African Burial Ground National Monument
World Trade Center was designed on the ground above the bones of some 20,000 enslaved Africans. They are buried 25 feet below Lower Manhattan. It's not out of bounds to extrapolate that ground zero itself was built on the bones of African enslaved people. That is to say, hallowed ground. This is No Coincidence.
For some time, activists, historians, and city officials have been working together to excavate and preserve the bones of the enslaved people 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 black people were eventually reinterred.
African captives 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 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.
Park51 won't even be at ground zero proper (across from Brooks Brothers or the Century 21 department store). But if it were, it would still be perfectly defensible. In fact, since WTC was likely built over the centuries-old bones of Muslim slaves, it would be a downright blessing.
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Warriors of African Consciousness
Remember to listen to Your black history podcast, The Gist of Freedom
WWW.BlackHistoryBlog.com
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| photo series, White Shoes by artist Nona Faustine calls attention to the enduring legacy of slavery of Wall Street, New York |
