NYC councilman: Burial ground highlights reparations battle

• Originally published on 4/12/2004 in the Final Call [here]
  

NYC councilman: Burial ground highlights reparations battle
By Jerry Muhammad
 During his 2004 Saviours' Day address Feb. 29 in Chicago, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan told the crowd that Black people need to learn of the horrors of what happened during and after their slavery. "If the government of the United States is willing to look at the problem they will get a different thought about what is justice and why Black people continue to cry out for justice," he said.

'Our youth must understand that reparations is not a handout, nor is it affirmative action, neither is it welfare. It is a debt owed. It was our people who were sold on the stock market as human stock.'
-Charles Barron, New York City Councilman

A good starting point into the examination of what Blacks suffered during the more than 300 years of slavery in the United States may be what is called the "African burial ground" in New York City.

The site, discovered during the construction of a federal building in May 1991, covers six city blocks and is considered by many to be one of the most important historical and scientific discoveries, not only for Blacks, but for America and the world.

It is believed that about 20,000 Blacks were buried in the area that includes City Hall and the State Supreme Court. Since the discovery and unearthing of 427 skeletal remains, scientific analysis has yielded some amazing results.

"Our young people need to understand what the African burial ground represents," New York City Councilman Charles Barron told The Final Call . "The 427 bodies represent a small fraction of the 20,000 African bodies interred in downtown Manhattan. The African burial ground shows that Africans built New York and their reward was exploitation, rape and murder," he added.

The councilman's assertion is supported by historical data from the city's records that reveal in 1625, after the Dutch captured Blacks and brought them across the Atlantic Ocean, the area that is now New York City was almost all wilderness. Blacks, the records further show, were made to cut down the trees and worked at the Colonial sawmill on the upper east side, cleared the land and built the wall around the settlement for which Wall Street is named. "This is an excellent example of why reparations is needed," the councilman pointed out.

Archaeological, bio-anthropological and historical findings by Howard University uncovered that nine percent of the burials were children under the age of two, while another 32 percent were below the age of puberty. The study also found that the children's death rate was disproportionately higher and they suffered from mental defects, resulting from malnutrition, prolonged or recurring bouts of illness that led to delayed bone development.

Dr. Michael Blakely of Howard University, scientific director of the project studying the site, believes there is also evidence of at least some infanticide. He also said that most of the children had rickets, scurvy, anemia or other related diseases.

Some of the remains were traumatized by bone injury or broken necks showing that Africans were worked beyond human capacity. The strain on the muscles and ligaments was so extreme that muscle attachments were commonly ripped away form the skeleton, taking chunks of bone with them leaving the body in perpetual pain. In other words, they were literally worked to death.

Adult women were found to live only into their early thirties and adult men into the mid-thirties. Moreover, the death rate of men and women, aged 15 to 25, was unusually high relative to those of the English colonial population.

Biological research on 29 skeletons conducted by Dr. Blakely showed that the matrilineal line of the deceased included cultures from the Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Fulbe, the Tuaregs in Niger, Senegal, Benin and the Asante of Ghana.

"Our youth must understand that reparations is not a handout, nor is it affirmative action, neither is it welfare. It is a debt owed. It was our people who were sold on the stock market as human stock," Councilman Barron remarked.

Jewish people across the world have fought for, and won, substantial reparations for the horrors they endured during the Holocaust. For Minister Farrakhan, the memory of what Blacks endured is a key element in the present struggle for reparations. 

"There is not a Jewish person in America who is unaware of the Jewish Holocaust," said Minister Farrakhan during his Feb. 29 address. "I want Black people to become so filled with the knowledge of what happened to us and our rich, historic past that we will rise as a people and say with meaning, ?Never, ever, ever again.'"