In NYC, A Tale of Two Monuments

This country's discomfort with talking about slavery is like as as with other forms of violence, extremely well established from the attempt to elide it the constitution through to the fights over teaching it in state legislatures all across the country right now. That's Sue Mobley, Director of Research at Monet. a nonprofit leading really important conversation. about the function and future of monuments.

She lives in New Orleans. If you have a street named after Orleans and you are not a saint, a literal saint. You benefited from the slave trade. And by extension, the entire wealth of the country is predicated on the development of racial capital. And that's as true for shippers in Rhode Island as it is for cotton farmers in Mississippi. But that has been the key ethos of this country from the beginning is don't talk about it.

This is Monumental, a podcast series produced by PRX. I'm your host, Ashley Seaford. The legacy of slavery in the History is undeniable. Completely overwhelming. Yet we're a long way from acknowledging how fundamental to how America came. In the meantime, we continue to fight about the world. Slavery should be discussed. This dilemma is playing out in our monument. As we compare and A few blocks away in this case. On Wall Street sits Federal Hall, a place dedicated to the federal. Mini first.

and the first U.S. president. Less than a mile north of Federal Hall is the African Burial Ground, dedicated to the 419 in Africans buried there. Considered together, the two sites highlight how we talk about the Possible. Emily Nadal was a National Park Service ranger at both sites, and she brings us this tale of two.

Cheney McKnight is a person museums call when things aren't so good. Cultural institutions and museums usually seek me out when they're in trouble. Um, it is rarely that it's a good day and they're like, Hey, come and train our staff. A lot of times it's after an incident happened, maybe they went viral. about a negative interaction guest ad at their site. So it's very rare that it's a a good day.

She's the founder and owner of a consultation service called Notch Your Mama's History, which helps historic sites better engage the public around enslavement. I first met McKnight about six years ago. She was volunteering at a historical site where I was working as a park ranger. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the protests that followed, McKnight got a spike in phone calls.

The country started to think differently about a lot of things. We were reconsidering how we present our history and what stories we tell. That included taking a closer look at our monuments. I think especially for West monuments are extremely important mentally and places Topics or places.

The public conversation about American monuments really started to heat up in the last few years, with the racial reckoning sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement. But I've been thinking about them for a while, because I used to be a park ranger for the National Park Service.

I was stationed at monument sites in New York City for five years. My job as an interpretive ranger was to learn about and deeply understand these places and then present them to visitors to try to build meaningful connections. I was already doing that work on some level. some level when I met McKnight. She had a unique approach to communicating history. In a video on her website, she's walking around a park in the Bronx for an event at a historical home.

I'm like looking at them like why are you looking at me like this? And then I remember. I'm wearing historical garb. That's why they looking at me crazy. She's certainly bold, whether with her clothing or table she sets up in public with a sign that reads, Let's talk about slavery. That boldness and creativity got me thinking about better ways I could fulfill my role. as a steward of the sites in my care back when I was a park ranger, including how we talked about slavery.

I met up with McKnight recently at the African Burial Ground National. One of the sites where I worked is The remains of black New Yorkers from the colonial era, including the formerly enslaved, were discovered and reinterred here after the year. Fight. The African Burial Ground has become an important site for learning about the history of slavery and its role in the foundation of this country. But there was another site I worked at. It was less than a mile from the bird.

and it's where we told the story of the birthplace of our country. During my time working there, I was frustrated at how little we said about slavery in that story. So, what can we learn about how far we've come in acknowledging the role of slavery in America by looking at these two sites? Let's start with the African burial ground. It's important to understand how it even came to be. Back when New York was under British rule, The city was just a southern tip of what we now call Manhattan.

Black people were not allowed to bury their dead within city limits, so they went about a mile north to an undeveloped piece of land. The burial ground was in use for more than a century, from about 1697 to the 1790s. But those dates are hard to calculate, because even then, there were no markings designating it as a burial ground, no headstones to identify the to rest there, and few maps actually labeled it. The site fell out of use, and the city continued to grow on top of it.

The burial ground was uncovered in nineteen ninety one, and a lot's trained. We started thinking more deeply about the first time. We choose to memorialize and how they represent the story of America. That shift has also affected the attention given. Since places like the burial ground are far fewer than monuments to water, It's become a site that symbolizes much bigger ideas. Ideas about slavery nationwide,

Ideas about injustice and racism and power. And it likely wouldn't even have existed without the tireless work of a group of volunteers known as the descendant community.

I have a love affair with the with the uh African Mary O'Brown. One of those volunteers is Doctor Patricia Leonard, a doctor of holistic theology. She's been devoted to the site since it was rediscovered in nineteen ninety one. It was a news broadcast. While government officials have withheld comment and have sealed the site from the public.

Fox News has learned that archaeologists have discovered a historic site at this location at 290 Broadway, where a federal office building is scheduled to be built between Dwayne and Reed Streets. So I'm I'm like, What? You know. And I w I was floored. So I just started reading the paper and catching up on things and people in my community and in my church of course was everybody was abuzz with

Wow, how come we didn't know about this? Dr. Leonard was finding out that in the process of constructing a new federal building in Lower Manhattan, workers came across hundreds of intact human remains. And the remains were mostly of people of African descent who lived and died in New York City during the eighteenth century. Dr. Leonard was volunteering with the Schaumburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the time. She and her fellow activists felt something had to be done, right?

Surely construction wouldn't just continue, but the General Services Administration, which was the agency responsible for erecting that federal building, had a different take. The word was out. The government is not moving. They want to build this building. The remains are being disrespectfully handled. They're continuing to excavate them. We just want them to stop and let them rest in peace and these are our ancestors. All of that. So doctor Leonard and other advocates got to work.

We are all deeply ashamed of the discrimination in our history. David Dinkins, who was the mayor of New York City at the time, is here speaking at a nineteen ninety two landmark preservation committee hearing. That makes it doubly important to treat these remains with the dignity and respect so often denied them during their lifetimes. Here's Dr. Leonard again.

One of the things that I think everybody was in sync with is that we wanted justice and we wanted respect and we wanted these remains to be treated with dignity. We've talked about you know, you have to go through the whole thing. The aftermath of slavery, the residual effects of slavery, the continued inequality, the continued to continue t and now this? And now the government is is fighting and and and haggling and they wanna put a plaque on the wall. That that I remember so distinctly.

A plaque on the wall. That's what the government was offering at first. They didn't want to budge on erecting their high-rise building and adjoining pavilion. And it was like, no, that that won't cut it. So then that's when demonstrations, there were lots of demonstrations, there were lions. So the community was very, very serious about it.

Keep that plaque the government offered in mind while I tell you about that other National Park Service site I worked at, Federal Hall. It has a connection to African burial ground, but that's not immediately clear. It's a site that was established by the National Park Service nearly a hundred years ago, with a commitment from the federal government to preserve it as a national shrine.

The Park Service presents Federal Hall as the quote birthplace of American government. It was where the Bill of Rights was drafted and ratified. It was where the Supreme Court met for the first time in the And what it's most known for is serving as the nation's first capital for all of 16 months. The marble and granite structure is no doubt beautiful, but it's not the actual building where all this great history happened.

This structure, we're now calling Federal Hall, was built on the site in 1842. It served as a custom house. a subtreasury, and a government office building. Then in the 1930s, the government decided to demolish it. But a group of advocates who called themselves the Federal Hall Memorial Associates stepped in in 1939 to raise money to save it.

Within that same year, the building was designated a historic site, then was put under the Park Service's care. Designating it as a National Park Service site would show that it was more than a local landmark. And that it mattered to the whole country, that the federal government would use its power and resources to protect and maintain it.

But advocates fighting for the African burial ground in the nineteen nineties would struggle for more than a decade before the site received the protection of the National Park Service. We lobbied for it to become a New York City landmark. We lobbied for it to become a national landmark because it deserves that. This was a site. that was allocated to a people who were cast out. Because they could not be buried with other fog.

Public hearings about the future of the burial ground were filled with passionate arguments defending the future of the site. One of those voices was Congressman Gus Savage. He convened a subcommittee hearing on the African burial ground in 1992. You can hear his frustration as he addresses government officials in charge of the site. I am not going to be a part of your disrespect of what people here fectify and scholars have called the most important archaeological discovery in this century.

But I'm gonna do Gus Savage everything in my power to make you change your optimacy and your disrespect for a sector of this city. And with that having been said, Eventually, the government and advocates came to a compromise. The building was going up, but a portion of land would be set aside as a place for the excavated remains to be reinterred.

The first order of business was to make sure the 419 sets of recovered remains would be handled with dignity and care. That's where Dr. Michael L. Blakey comes in. I combine the study of human biology with archaeology, so that makes me a bioarchaeologist. Dr. Blakey is a professor of anthropology and American studies at William E'Mary University. He led the effort to analyze the remains recovered at the burial ground.

His work to understand a little bit of the story of each and every one of the remains excavated from the site helps us learn more about slavery in New York City. As a ranger decades later, the information Dr. Blakey had uncovered was a big part of the tours I gave. It was a way of bringing this history to life in the very place it all happened.

Take, for example, the story of one burial we pointed out to visitors, which showed the care they took in burying their loved ones. Tacks were nailed into one coffin laid. In a heart shaped symbol scholars believe to be something called a sankofa. It's derived from a West African saying that signifies learning from the past to inform the future. The meaning was so fitting for the burial.

That it ultimately started being used to represent the site. Knowing those kinds of stories from Dr. Blakey's research is a privilege we don't often have. That's because there aren't many written records about Africans in New York City in the 18th century. and most of what we do have is written from the viewpoint of European Americans. So they were writing about what interested them.

And there was little about Africans that appears to have interested them except what they were sold for, what they were taxed for. The lack of information about the enslaved people of New York is especially surprising since the city had the second highest population of enslaved people during the colonial period. It was only behind Charleston, South Carolina. So many visitors I met as a park ranger were surprised to learn this.

As a native New Yorker, I was surprised when I first learned this. New York is hardly ever associated with slavery. Most northern states aren't. We think slavery was just an issue in the South. For visitors at the burial ground, the shock wasn't just that slavery existed, it was also in learning about the magnitude of it. In colonial New York by the 1730s, one in five people were of African descent, most of whom were enslaved. What archaeology can discover becomes very important.

And we did it in a way seeking to humanize, to understand them as human beings. A big part of understanding them was getting to know the work that they were subjected to. And Dr. Blakey found a lot of evidence of that work in their bones. Finding out that women were doing just as strenuous work as men is just one of the revelations Dr. Blakey came across through studying the remains. He also learned about the different types of labor they were doing.

And they were essentially responsible for powering the country's early economy, forced to work in lucrative industries like tobacco and cotton. As a port city, New York's early development and expansion relied on enslaved people and shipbuilding. doctor Blakey also found their stories continue to be told at the end of their lives too. The importance of burial as a hum as something all humans should recognize as important can be found.

In New York, in the archaeological site, we found very careful burials because these Africans insisted on their humanity.

This was just one of Dr. Blakey's valuable discoveries, and it was made possible because the burial ground was now a protected site. Now let's consider a different hurdle. How should this place be presented to the public? Let's go back to Cheney McKnight. She's the historical educator we met at the start of the story. I would say specifically in America, we place a lot of importance on monuments. And having this here in the minds of Americans.

It says, this place is important. I personally don't need a monument to tell me what's important, but if it helps to get stories told and get sites protected. Having a structure was really important to early burial ground advocates. Back when I worked at these Park Service sites, so many visitors came in and said they were just passing by. They were drawn there out of curiosity about the physical monuments.

So I understood how powerful monuments could be. But how do you incorporate hundreds of years of slavery and history into just one monument? My name is Rodney Leon and I'm the designer after the African Barrel Ground Memorial. Rodney Leon was one of dozens of architects who entered a design competition. held by the General Services Administration, and the National Park Service more than two decades ago.

Today, he's a seasoned architect with his own firm that's been behind several projects in New York City and abroad, including the Ark of Return Memorial at the United Nations. But when the competition was taking place, Leon was in his 20s and new to the field. The burial ground would be one of his first large-scale architectural pieces, and what a big task it was. What was the best way to honor the recovered remains? That's what he had to figure out.

A few months ago, we met up at the burial ground. He told me about each of the elements he chose to include in his design. The most prominent feature is a wall of remembrance. So that wall of remembrance serves as a kind of like a marker you can see from a distance. Even if you're across the street, you should be able to see the Sankofa symbol on the Wall of Remembrance.

and even make out the words for all those who are lost, for all those who are stolen, for all those who are left behind, for all those who are not forgotten. So even if you're walking by and you kind of catch a glimpse of that, that acknowledgement Let you know that this is a special space. This is a special place. Do you hear that water flowing in the background? It's another one of the features Liana included as part of the memorial. We stood next to it as we spoke.

Leon explained that noise was something he considered in designing the memorial, since it would be located on a busy Manhattan street. Part of the memorial is actually sunken below street level for this reason. It's kind of secluded from the surrounding city, which allows visitors a space to reflect.

That space is where Leon and I did some reflection of our own. He told me that if he were to enter the contest today, he'd probably design the memorial a lot differently. We are only here representing the past in a particular moment in time. I think that memorials should also be thinking about and considering potential expansion and transformation.

So in a lot of ways sites I think need to have spaces that represent like our contemporary understanding and allow also opportunities for different ideas for them to grow in the future.

I feel like I really understand what Leon is articulating here, about how monuments must adapt for an ever-changing world. But my perspective comes from my work as a park ranger. Remember we talked about Federal Hall? I spent a majority of my time there, having to tell the story of the beginnings of our country while leaving out a big chunk of it. The story of slavery.

The site was established at a time when our country was still largely leaving slavery out of the story. And when I worked there, that was still reflected in what was on display. For instance, one room has dioramas of the building at different points in time. Another room has his original Federal Hall blueprints, and another display is dedicated to George Washington's inauguration. But nowhere are there mentions of slavery. When we come back, producer Emily Nadal looks closer at how federal.

That's next on Monumental. PRX. I don't think can tell the story of slavery in America or tell the story of America without going to Federal Hall. We're back with Chanie McKnight again. I wanted to speak with her about the role Federal Hall plays and how the story of Number one, our first person was sworn in there. It was the site of the first Congress. The Supreme Court started. So we actively have legislation going through that space.

That directly impacted the lives of enslaved persons and free black folks and all over the country to tell the story of Federal Hall without mentioning slavery, I would call that interpretive malpractice.

The African Burial Ground and Federal Hall really wouldn't exist without each other, because our country was built on slave labor. And more specifically, many of the founding fathers who worked at Federal Hall, George Washington included, were also enslavers. During the same historic times that get remembered at Federal Hall, the burial ground nearby was being used by enslaved people who'd built the city around it.

But when I worked at Federal Hall before the pandemic, there weren't any exhibits that told that part of the story. In fact, it seemed like Federal Hall and the African Burial Ground were telling separate histories. At Federal Hall, we celebrated all of the country's patriotic holidays, like July 4th, President's Day, even Flag Day. At the burial ground, we celebrated Juneteenth and Pinksters.

Juneteenth marks when freedom was granted to the nation's final enslaved black people, and Pinkster was celebrated by enslaved Africans in New York as a time of rest from work. This year I stopped by Federal Hall on July 4th to see what the sites were doing to celebrate. It's 3 a.m. Alright. April 30th, 1789. Uh the city around us is quiet and dark. cobblestone streets, two-story buildings. Tomorrow, uh George Washington will stand on that balcony.

You can't even Federal Hall was hosting a play by a group called the Democracy Project about New York City's time as the first capital and George Washington's first term. The building was packed with visitors and the free play was standing room only. And while the play did bring up slavery, it was used in a comedic way, like when they pretended to abruptly cast one of the black actresses as Ona Judge.

This is your costume. You play on a judge. On a judge? You mean the woman Martha Washington enslaved? Mm-hmm. But. Uh, do you play a slave too? It's a play set in 1789. What do you think? And what was the burial ground doing? I walked over there too, only to find out it was closed. I reached out to the Park Service to ask why. I was connected with Raymond Manguel, who is the supervisory park ranger for Manhattan Sites, which includes Federal Hall and African Burial Ground.

He told me the parks closing on July fourth was actually part of an experiment they were doing at the request of the descendant community. Four years ago the park was asked to discontinued p programming on July fourth and to highlight the importance of Juneteenth as an official Independence Day, the park began actually start beginning offering special programs on juneteenth, well before it becomes uh recognized as a federal holiday.

It makes sense that July 4th wouldn't be celebrated at the burial ground. Enslaved people didn't gain their freedom on what the nation marks as Independence Day. Frederick Douglass famously expressed this in a speech in 1852. What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer. A day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a share. Your boasted liberty and unholy license.

Your national greatness, swelling vanity, your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless. Doctor Leonard wasn't involved in the Park Service's decision to close African burial ground last year on July 4th, but I still wanted to hear what she thought about the situation. Three options here. It could be open with business as usual, you know, the tours, the this, the that, the conversation. It could be closed out of respect for what does the fourth of July mean?

to us, as Fred Douglas so el eloquently spoke about. And we can just pretend that it doesn't exist and ignore it. Or it can be as many people feel, well, it's a holiday, it's a paid holiday. I'll take it. I don't have to go to a parade. I don't have to wave a flag. I don't have to do any of those things.

I don't know, it's just kind of like up for grabs. Doctor Leonard said she could probably make a case for having the burial ground open or closed and understands why the decision is so difficult. I think it's a conversation that needs to be continued, not so much about whether or not the site is going to be open or not, but if it is open, I think I think we need to do some kind of relevant programming.

and take some kind of a leadership role in in better understanding, not just for African Americans, but for everybody who comes to the burial ground. In my conversation with Raymond Manguel, he told me that after experimenting with closing the burial ground on July 4th, the Park Service decided it would be open moving forward. What I took from his explanation. explanation was that all their sites are open on that holiday. So why should an African burial ground be too?

But this idea that the Park Service is still figuring out and working through these questions was interesting to me. So I dug a little deeper when I spoke with Menguel. I asked him to share his thoughts about the potential to integrate the sites. We are always looking To find ways.

to make that direct connection and collaboration between sites, not only here in New York, but between multiple national parks across the nation. Between Federal Hawaiian and the African Barrier Ground, there's a civil rights story emblem in the reason why both sides were established. As a matter of fact, we have offer uh self guided walking tours, the African uh American Freedom Trail that tells the story of the African burial ground at the lower Manhattan.

When I heard Manguel bring up a walking tour, I was intrigued. It wasn't around when I worked there. So I decided to check it out. So I'm in Lower Manhattan right now in Battery Park. I'm on the first stop of the slavery New York tour. As Manguel said, this high-tech tour, which involves downloading an app and incorporates different voices and imagery to bring these stories to life, is something new for the Park Service.

I started my tour at the southern tip of Manhattan. Looking out at the Hudson River, I heard about how important the harbor was to the city's development, and about the first enslaved men to be brought to these same shores. The written record is sketchy, but it appears that the first enslaved Africans arrived around sixteen twenty six. Eleven of them. And some were put to work here on building Fort Amsterdam.

So much of Lower Manhattan is still reminiscent of that early colonial period. I took a tangled path through the city streets to each stop. I was led to John Street. That's where I listened to the story of John Street Methodist Church. It's the oldest Methodist church in the country, and it allowed black New Yorkers to start their own congregation in the 1700s. From there, I made my way further north to City Hall Park, where I sat on one of the benches next to the massive municipal building.

I heard about how this area was used in the 1700s as a gathering place for black New Yorkers. It's also thought to be where they celebrated Pinksters. And it's not far from where the tour ends. So the last stop on the tour is African burial ground. It's the seventh stop. and according to rules to protect our national heritage 419 bodies were exhumed and meticulously examined by scientists at the Cobb Laboratory of Howard University. The tour ends here.

One of the things I liked about the tour was that it incorporated Federal Hall as one of its stops. Here you learned about the country's early legislation around slavery and the people who pushed it through. But as I stood at Federal Hall listening to its history told through my headphones, I still felt like something was missing. A humongous bronze statue of George Washington.

Here was someone so central to this story who is enshrined in that very building. And I wondered why the tour didn't dig into his involvement with slavery. I would have liked to have heard about the challenges Washington faced. Like when he brought enslaved people with him to New York when he was president. Or about the ways he avoided talking about slavery in public, even as a leader of our country. But we didn't hear any of those things on this tour.

This was the site where George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the United States in 1789 when New York City was the first Catholic. Here's McKnight again. I think that Federal Hall really falls directly into the American fairy tale that we've all heard our whole lives in school. where the Patriots prevailed and like at the end of a movie we have George Washington there and it's a triumphant moment at the beginning of this grand country.

As a park ranger, I tried really hard to not let Federal Hall just be a fairy tale for visitors. I thought it was important to use the sites we had under our care to create a more well-rounded experience and understanding. But the sites remained very separate during my time. Apart from featuring each other's brochures, we didn't do much to connect their stories. And I thought the people who lost out most because of it. Where the visitors were I was actually very shocked.

that I have been to Federal Hall multiple times over the years and I don't think that I've ever heard them talk about slavery. You're missing a whole chunk of the story and Is ignorance bliss? For some people in this country it is, but for others We're trying to blow away their bliss. A well-produced walking tour was a great start, but what about the visitors who just happen to stop in? Or the ones who are strapped for time or don't speak fluent English?

While the Tor connects these sites outside of their physical spaces, it's important for that to happen inside too. I do not think that. A picture of George Washington belongs at the African burial ground. No, no. I do believe in interpreting, we have to talk about it.

we have to talk about the legislation, we have to talk about the economics that uh got us here. And you can't talk about how hundreds of thousands of Africans were forcibly b brought to these shores and not talk about all of the steps that led them here. just as you can't talk about how George Washington made it to the steps of Federal Hall without talking about the wealth that came from generations of free labor in this country.

McKnight and I aren't the only ones who think that the Park Service can make better use of both sites by leaning on each other. Dr. Leonard thinks so too. This is not just black history, this is American history. And we have to kind of remember that too and keep that in mind. О, да пипкин би ремайда но диссизнас. This is this is everybody takes responsibility here. Let's just start with telling the truth. The simple truth. And then I think how they integrate. will become a natural thing.

I left the Park Service in the summer of 2020 to go to graduate school for journalism. It was the height of the pandemic, and the country was in the midst of a racial I watched the burial ground slowly become a larger part of that conversation. It was brought up in listicles of sites to honor black history. Or places to celebrate Jun.

Many people were recognizing the burial ground as a place of great importance to the country. I was so happy to see the burial ground becoming relevant to younger people. Its story was being told and it was again getting the publicity it so deserved. But it seemed like people were looking to the burial ground for something.

I don't think that the site reckons with the history of slavery. I think it's a monument to the remains here. I think it tells the story of the people. What were their lives like? But I don't think that it's actively here doing the work. of really making these important connections with slavery and how did it get us here today. African Burial Ground National Monument was never supposed to be a national reckoning with slavery.

It was created to be a memorial to those buried there, not the country's response to centuries of enslavement. And nothing like that even exists to this day. For doctor Leonard, coming to a place of reckoning starts with becoming okay with talking about this part of our history. Don't forget now, w we're still not comfortable talking about slavery. That's still not a full blown conversation. There's been no official apology even. So how can we move towards anything beyond that?

And one place to start having those conversations is Federal Hall. It was something I tried to do during my ring. In my spiel about George Washington, I always like to include Ona Judge's story too. She was enslaved by the Washington family and escaped during his presidency while the Washingtons were living in Philadelphia.

Washington relentlessly sought Judge and couldn't understand why she had escaped in the first place. Judge offered to return to Mount Vernon, the Washington home, on the condition that she'd be freed upon the death of Washington and his wife, Martha. an offer Washington was furious to receive. In the end, Judge never returned to captivity. She gave up seeing her family ever again, in exchange for her freedom. I want to judge a story as heavy.

I remember seeing the shock on some visitors' faces when they did get that dose of reality about the man idolized in a memorial all around them. I think um what we have to understand is that there will be people who do not want to hear about slavery in this country. Um they don't want to hear about the injustices in this country. They don't wanna hear anything about anything that paints their who they perceive their ancestors to be as bad or having done something wrong.

But that's not what educators such as myself is trying to do. I am not trying to paint George Washington as an evil villain. I'm really trying to get people to learn of him as a human being. Take him off the pedestal and look him directly into the eyes. If we understand that he was a flawed individual who did both good and horrible things. We can also look at ourselves critically and see that we too can do horrible things.

How much can a monument do to help us grapple with issues like slavery? That's a question I discussed with art historian Sarah Lewis. She's an associate professor of the humanities and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where she co-teaches a class called Monuments. Monuments have become one of the most outsized, bold, uh objects of this kind, symbols of this kind.

For Lewis, the fact that a monument exists at all is a testament to our collective belief in what they stand for. The fact of it is the success. The future indicates whether that is really it it's right estimation. So in Lewis's view, African burial ground is a success as a monument, but whether it serves its full purpose is a different story. The success of a monument is the fact of it having been erected. We determine whether we are successful in taking up the charge of these objects.

Lewis also explains that monuments reveal what our country deems important. By that measure, it would seem like slavery isn't central to the story of America. And we still struggle to recognize this. That's one of the reasons it took so many years, so much effort, and tireless dedication from burial gun activists to make the site a reality.

There were a lot of lessons learned and questions asked along the way. Like, what does it mean to be a national monument? How can we do a better job of teaching about slavery? What's the best way to memorialize such significant places? These questions are in the news again. Dr. Patricia Singletary says she first learned that there are human remains of enslaved and free Africans buried under a city bus depot back in 2009. African burial ground in Lower Manhattan is not the city's

only burial ground for African Americans. Just this past summer, the city announced plans for the next phase of archaeological work at a burial ground in Harlem beneath a bus depot. Former City Council Speaker Melissa Mark Bivarito was an early advocate for the site. Here she is speaking on a local news station, WPIX. Nobody ever thought that the busy po was gonna be decommissioned. They thought we were crazy to even offer that as an op you know as a solution.

Here we are. The bus has been decom most people decommissioned. Now the city is set to honor and recognize the cemetery, announcing the next phase of archaeological work at the African Burial Ground. Could we apply the lessons learned from the creation and perseverance of African burial ground downtown to the protection of this new African burial ground site in Harlem?

I didn't think I'd still be talking about Federal Hall and African Burial Ground as much as I do, more than three years after leaving my Park Ranger job. I often think about how I could have done a better job interpreting these places. I'm still telling these stories, now as a journalist, and the monuments are continuing to teach me. We're still very much in the beginning stages of reckoning with our past, and we as a country continue to examine what we want for future monuments.

Monuments are not for the remains. They aren't. They are for us that are left behind. I may ruffle a few feathers with this, but um my priority in monuments. are for descendants of enslavement. Helping them to heal, providing a space for them to connect. and to heal because their trauma did not end at slavery, it did not end at the passage of the Voting Rights Act. It did not end uh in the summer of twenty twenty. And so there's a lot more work that needs to be done.

A New York congressman recently introduced a bill. If passed, it would create an international slavery and memorial. And Education Center as part of the National Park Service's African Burial Ground site. The museum would cover the story of slavery in the country and beyond. When the African burial ground descended successfully establish a proper memorial, their efforts were only the beginning.

Their legacy is one of not just settling for a plaque, one that demands not just inclusivity, but respect and dignity too. The lessons we can take from their efforts go beyond just work to establish memorials. You can see it in more recent movements to resist book bans or the attempts to exclude this history from school curriculums. The influence of the African Burial Ground Memorial continues to keep us focused on the words etched on its facade. For all those who Not forgotten.

This episode of Monumental was written and produced by Emily Nadal. Special thanks to Sean Gazala, also to Andy Lancet, director of the University of the University of the University. archives at New York Public Radio and to the National Park Service. At Manhattan Sites. The senior editor for Monumental is Rosalind Tortesilius, and our senior producer is Nancy Rosenbau. Jamie York is our writer, and our production assistant is Perry Gregory. The show is recorded by Bryce Bowman.

And Ben Erickson at Earshot Audio Post and mixed by Tommy Bazarian. With support from Emanuel Desarme, Pedro Rafael Rosado, Morgan Flannery and Sandra Lopez Monsale. Fact-checking by Christina Ribello, our theme was composed and produced by Gelani. With additional music by Alexis Quadrado. Edwin Ochoa is our project manager and our executive producer. is Jocelyn Gonzalez. Monumental is produced by PRX Productions. a grant from the Mellon Foundation. For more on the show.

at prx.org slash monumental. From PRX.