Restless Burial Grounds in Lower Manhattan

The city's most pronounced crime scene possesses the virtue of rendering itself inconspicuous, unheralded and undistinguished by the stark fact of its presence?an undeveloped green abscess blocking City Hall's congested arteries. Mostly green, at least, because there's a dusty, tilled patch at the scene's elbow, Duane and Elk Sts., across from 26 Federal Plaza. That space is surrounded by police barriers and yellow caution tape. Something was supposed to happen in this dust patch this past Friday, but it didn't.

This particular plot of land is part of an uprooted mass grave, where historians estimate more than 20,000 enslaved Africans lie buried from circa 1625, the era of Dutch slavery in New Amsterdam, until the gravesite's American closing in 1794. Two placards proclaiming the site a national historic landmark tell passing federal and municipal employees to jettison any sentiment that their refined metropolis profited only indirectly from the Atlantic slave trade.

But more than 400 human remains no longer rest there, after the General Services Administration, the federal landlord, knowingly exhumed the bones in 1991 while constructing the Federal Office Bldg. at 290 Broadway. New York's descendant community was outraged over the removal of their ancestors from their resting place. Activists have spent the last decade demanding GSA reinter the bones as soon as possible following archeological research at Howard University. Plans for memorialization?including an "Interpretive Center" at 290 Broadway?and reburial have been sketched out since at least 1993. Expected deadlines for reinterment have come and gone.

The latest deadline was supposed to be last Friday. The most uncompromising of the groups involved in the project, the Committee of Descendants of the Afrikan Ancestral Burial Ground, told GSA that it wanted the bones restored to the burial site on Aug. 17, the anniversary of Marcus Garvey's birth. Ollie McClean, cochair of the Descendants?and a neighbor and family friend of mine?tells me that she'd spoken with GSA associate regional administrator Ronald Law and others about that date since the beginning of this year. Now that the Howard scientists had completed their research, McClean argued, reburial could occur and her committee's plan for a series of commemorative events could begin. McClean, who loathes the GSA and doesn't mind calling its black employees "Africans only in their skin tone," tells me that a few weeks ago GSA reneged on the date, after she and other Descendants were thrown out of GSA's offices under threat of arrest when they sought to stop the agency from conducting an ecumenical reburial ceremony scheduled for last Wednesday.

According to GSA, which has to date spent roughly $21 million on the various aspects of the burial ground project, none of this is true. Spokeswoman Cassandra Henderson told me on Wednesday, "I know nothing about that date [Aug. 17]. Reinterment is supposed to occur sometime this year. We still don't have a date." She added that she also knew nothing about the ecumenical ceremony McClean alleges GSA had planned. Her response comes as quite a shock to others I interviewed, including Dr. Sherrill Wilson, director of the Office of Public Education and Interpretation of the African Burial Ground Project (OPEI). While Wilson says that her understanding is that the date "was never confirmed," she tells me that "I was certainly told by GSA verbally that it was their plan to rebury on the 17th. By Ron Law."

OPEI consults with GSA and is charged with disseminating information to the public about the burial ground project's status. On July 21, it held a meeting for its volunteers to discuss activities surrounding reburial, which Law attended, in Wilson's words, to solicit OPEI's input. Two volunteers at the meeting, Dr. Martia Goodson and Laura Limuli, also remember Law saying reinterment would happen on Aug. 17. "[Law] definitely said that," Limuli tells me. "There wasn't any discussing or arguing. He said it was settled, that the date had been arranged with the Descendants."

Goodson goes further than that: "It was set in stone, that's what Mr. Law said about the date of reburial. I remember that he used the phrase 'written in stone.'"

Henderson has not responded to my request for comment on this discrepancy. A day after she told me that GSA still didn't have a reinterment date, she was quoted in Newsday as saying the agency would announce the date in two weeks to 30 days.

On the issue of the ecumenical ceremony, Wilson's and Goodson's recollections also seem to corroborate McClean's. Wilson says GSA never had "firm plans" for an ecumenical service, but she says she was told there would indeed be such a ceremony. She also recalls that an OPEI volunteer remembered a certain minister (whom Wilson declined to name) praying at the site during the initial excavation, and told Wilson that this minister should be invited to the service if others were. "I passed his name on to Ron Law, and he said, 'We've got his name on the list.'" Goodson recalls hearing about an ecumenical service at the beginning of the month at an OPEI meeting. McClean opposes such ceremonies at the reburial as presumptuous and inappropriate: "How can the government call on religious services?"

The Descendants' plans for memorialization, currently on hold, include an exhibit at The Lab on Fulton St. complete with African artifacts, a two-day historical seminar at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn and a reception at the Cotton Club. On Friday, a day after GSA used the gravesite to display some of the coffins it had made, the Descendants held a reburial ceremony of their own, albeit one without remains to bury. Next to the Duane St. placard, the committee placed an ankh of red carnations and a sewn wreath. About 100 Committee members paid tribute, with some bringing along framed portraits of Marcus Garvey. Ministers from the Ethiopian Coptic Church blessed the memorial. The Descendants drummed, sang, prayed and reaffirmed their faith in their protracted fight against GSA.