The African Burial Ground: A Lesson From Teaching With Historic Places

African Burial Ground National Monument, at Duane Street and African Burial Ground Way in the Civic Center section of Lower Manhattan, New York City. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Slavery was central to building European colonial settlements in the 17th and 18th centuries. Dutch traders laid the foundations of what is now New York in 1626 and enslaved Africans for manual labor in New Amsterdam. The enslaved population grew after Great Britain took control of the colony in 1664, and by the time of the American Revolution the New York region had the largest concentration of Africans and people of African descent in the northern colonies.

For more than 200 years, a forgotten cemetery lay hidden under layers of concrete in downtown Manhattan. In 1991, archeologists uncovered it and found evidence of the lives and deaths of more than 8,000 Africans and Americans of African descent. The skeletal remains of 419 people were exhumed, studied and reburied where they were found. The site is now African Burial Ground National Monument, the country's earliest and largest known African American cemetery.

The lesson

The Park Service's Teaching with Historic Places program offers a "lightning lesson" on the site for middle and high school units on African and American history, religion and spirituality, the Middle Passage and slavery, and local history. It spans the colonial era of the 17th and 18th centuries and the present.

Its essential question: How do Americans show respect for the bodies and memories of the deceased? Students work to:

1. explain how and why African cultures are present in American culture;
2. describe the African Burial Ground and the archeological evidence found there;
3. identify how people memorialized the dead at what colonial New Yorkers called the "Negros Buriel Ground," and how the national monument memorializes them today;
4. optionally, complete a project on the Middle Passage, local history or family heritage.

Sources

• National Park Service, Teaching with Historic Places, "Discover the African Burial Ground: A Lightning Lesson from Teaching with Historic Places." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/discover-the-african-burial-ground-a-lightning-lesson-from-teaching-with-historic-places.htm
• Full lesson plan (PDF): https://www.nps.gov/subjects/teachingwithhistoricplaces/upload/Twhp-Lesson_AfricanBurialGroundNM2017.pdf