[Music] We are at the New York African Burial
Ground. It is one of the first National Monuments honoring enslaved and free Africans in this
country and certainly in the City of New York. African Burial Ground in the City of New York was
on my radar, late 1989 early 1990, when a coworker for the City of New York brought to my attention
an environmental impact statement. It was about this place that was going to be developed by the
United States federal government into an office building. My
work in the City of New York was
about building, but here now I was faced with a site that had personal, cultural, and historical
meaning to me and that launched me learning a lot, politically, socially. The project ultimately
set the bar for what community engagement really means, meaningful community engagement. It set the
bar for, you know, who should be leading projects that have difficult histories tied to marginalized
communities. Who has a voice, who gets to tell the story? To see th
ese mounds and to know that
there are individuals buried in coffins here, handcrafted coffins, you don't have to explain it.
It goes beyond that and it's a human experience. It goes beyond race and it goes beyond other
cultures, everybody understands what this place is. What's incredible about this interpretive
center and having this interpretive center here, first of all, it is the result of what the
community, the larger New York community said it wanted. One of the biggest and most signi
ficant
elements of the memorialization plan was in fact to make sure that the future generations
understand the history, understand what happened at the site, what it took to realize this
site, but also to understand what the history of New York was. In the United States of America, we
preserve battlegrounds because we say that that's important in our American history. And in similar
context for me, this is a battleground. This was a ground where revolutionary acts of remembrance
took plac
e. These are sacred sites with incredible dimension and significance. 2016 I joined a group
to work on fighting for the preservation of an African burial ground on the island of St. Helena
located in the South Atlantic between Africa and South America. It's unprotected right now, but it
has upwards of 10,000 formerly enslaved Africans who were were buried there. "Are you kidding
me?! This is huge, this is massive." It helps us ground the story around the global story and
the global fight to
elevate our history around the transatlantic slave trade and African, the African
experience, the African diasporic experience. So this is a place where visitors at the
interpretive center can leave a note and their reflections on what they've experienced here. This
is probably the first note that I've ever left. "Someone before me endured something and
I'm grateful." It's powerful to know that people took the time to write a message and
to know that after the fight by the community, the s
truggle to preserve this site, that it hasn't
lost its meaning. It actually is doing what the community wanted it to do, which is to impact
people, to inspire people, to build awareness, and to know that the story is being told and
that the people who write these messages, hopefully they'll go away and they'll
Inspire the same kind of work in their own communities because that's the only way that
our story is going to continue to live. [Music]
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