Seizing Intellectua; Power: The Dialogue at the New York African Burial Ground, Cheryl J. La Roche and Michael L. Blakey

Seizing Intellectua; Power: The Dialogue at the New York African Burial Ground, Cheryl J. La Roche and Michael L. Blakey

• The New York African Burial Ground Project embodies the problems, concerns, and goals of contemporary African and urban archaeology
• The project at once has informed and has been informed by the ever-watchful African Americans and New York public
• Excavation of the New York African Burial Ground has brought scholars, academicians, researchers, cultural resource managers, politicians, religious leaders, community activists, school children, and the general public together in a complex and often contentious philosophical and ideological relationship
• The dynamics of the relationship and the shape of the project have been determined to a large extent by the relentless determination of the African-American descendent community to exercise control over the handling and disposition of the physical remains and artifacts of their ancestors
• When the United States General Services Administration (GSA) contracted for the construction of a 34-story office building at Broadway, Duane, Elk, and Reade streets, New York City, on a site that historical maps indicated had been an 18th-century "Negroes Burying Ground", it did not anticipate the storm of controversy that lay buried and moribund beneath nearly 30 ft. of fill
• Excavations of the African Burial Ground began in the summer of 1991 and continued through July 1992
• Early projections indicated that 50 burials would be recovered from an undisturbed area beneath Manhattan and Republican Alleys
• As chairperson on the Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds, Congressman Gus Savage brought the influence and power of the U.S. Congress to challenge the GSA
• Allocation of building funds for the federal government was controlled by this subcommittee, and it was Congressman Savage's gavel that signaled the end of the excavation
• Other African Americans were also uniquely positioned for a collaborative "power play" that changed the course and direction of the project
• Journalists brought the power of the press
• A team led by Michael Blakely of Howard University brought the final necessary component, intellectual power and technical expertise
• The research team based at Howard University began presenting its proposal to direct the site's analysis in April 1992
• By that time, it was apparent that no contract had been let for analysis and that the research design developed by the Historic Conservation and Interpretation, Inc (HCI), the original cultural resource management firm hired to excavate the site has been rejected by review agencies
• In June 1992, negotiations were taking place between Blakely as Howard University's representative and Daniel Roberts of John Milner Associates (JMA)
• JMA was in the initial phases of replacing HCI, which was having difficulty administering a project of this magnitude
• By July 1992, after a constant barrage of petitions, angry rhetoric, and community dissension, congressional hearings, professional meetings, lobbying, and political action, leadership and control of the entire project was eventually awarded to more sympathetic institutions with greater experience and which were better developed for research of this kind
• Howard University has engaged a national and international team of Africanist and African-Americanist scholars for archaeological and historical analysis.
• JMA established an office in New York City and is assisting Howard University with laboratory processing and conservation of artifacts
• The research design specifies three major research questions about the people buried at the site: what are the origins of the population, what was their physical quality of life, and what can the site reveal about the biological and cultural transition from African to African-American identities
• In 1995, the project's specialists added the examination of "modes of resistance" as a fourth major question
• The African presence in colonial New York is approached from an African diasporic perspective, taking into account the African societies from which most of the population is derived and placing New York within the context of the broader American diaspora
• The scientific approach is also biocultural and biohistorical
• The significance of the site, according to the research design, should be understood in relation to the "vindicationist" effort and the critical intellectual, educational, and political concerns of the African-American community
• An adequate understanding of the scholarly and public concerns relating to the African Burial Ground must be informed by an awareness of long-standing debates about the politics of the past among African Americans
• The skeletal population excavated from the African Burial Ground represents the remains of some of the first Africans brought to North America
• The potential for the stereotypical, sterile, and denigrating interpretations of the site based on morphometric analysis became increasingly apparent to the African-American community
• Distortions of the African and African-American past by anthropologists and historians have been a prominent concern of African Americans for nearly 150 years
• Members of the MFAT seemed keen on demonstrating to the public their technical knowledge by showing the cranial and post-cranial traits they used to classify the race of skeletons
• The intellectual background to the issues of racial determination may shed some light, however
• The similarities between this historical example and the forensic approaches initially proposed for the African Burial Ground can be very informative
• Furthermore, the use of inadequately tested post-cranial measurements for determining race raised both scholarly and public questioning
• Biological race--Negroids, Caucasoids, Mongoloids--was viewed by forensics experts as the most objective or scientific means of classification
• The proposed alternative combined morophological, morphometric, and molecular genetic data to assess specific breeding population affiliations
• Embedded in the context of the New York African Burial Ground phenomenon is a sophisticated awareness on the part of the African-American public regarding the demeaning abuses of anthropology and history by Euroamericans
• During the excavation phase of the project, the public was kept informed through a "grassroots," community-based newsletter, Ground Truth, by word of mouth, and by contracting the GSA directly for information
• Sherrill D. Wilson was named director of the Office of Public Education and Interpretation (OPEI), formerly known as the Liason Office
• By focusing on the need to fill the gaps of omission left by Eurocentric public history in New York City, Wilson was participating in the long tradition of what St. Clair Drake termed "vindicationism"
• Eurocentric distortions of Africana history have been viewed not as accidental flaws of individual researchers but as politically motivated and systemic means of social, intellectual, and cultural control
• In virtually every area where evidence from the past is needed to support the validity of a given proposition, a historian can be found who will provide the evidence that is needed
• Carter C. Woodson, perhaps the most important single African-American historian, founded the Association for the study of Negro Life and History in 1915 and published the Journal of Negro History as the first outlet for the dissemination of black history
• Throughout the civil rights and black nationalist movements of the 1950s, '60s, and early '70s, "Black Studies" programs were fought for by African Americans and established at many universities
• During the 1980s and 1990s, an Afrocentric educational movement emerged in the black community in response to the distorted global and American history
• Indeed, New York's African Burial Ground was a vivid example of the omission of the colonial Africans' presence and contribution to the building of the city and the nation
• The African American public could at once turn to the abundant and tangible physical remains of the people omitted from the city's deficient school curricula
• The African-American public interested in the African Burial Ground was usually quite aware of bodies of "vindicationist," Africana studies and Afrocentric literature which held greater intellectual relevancy, while exposing the biases of "mainstream" or Eurocentric historiography and anthropology
• When vindicationist motivations were explained as part of the site's significance for the African-American community, Euroamericans, including members of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation, expressed fears and objections, characterizing the approach as ethnocentric bias
• Although the impetus for the project was cultural resource management, the implications have been broad and complex
• New Yorkers sought and still seek authority as the right to exercise influence over behavior, with African and African-American archaeologists and anthropologists directing the research
• For approximately the first 75 years of the history of American archaeology, until 1946, African Americans as well as other groups without an independent income were largely excluded from the profession
• The development of Cultural Resource Management (CRM) has fostered the growth of African-American archaeology since the 1960s, particularly in the South
• Some of the early work in the North included Robert Schuyler's study of oyster fisherfolk of Sandy Ground, Staten Island; Bert Salwen's study at Weeksville; James Deetz's study of black households in Massachusetts including Parting Ways and Black Lucy's Garden; and Mark Leone's public archaeology program at Annapolis
• CRM archaeologists have, however, been accountable to governmental and other clients who frequently are not principally interested in anthropological research, a problem which has pointed to the risk of "deskilling"
• Philosophical divergence occurs in several areas including methods of analysis and interpretation, semantics, and social interpretation
• In the informally segregated United States, archaeology and African-American Studies have developed as ethnically distinct disciplines, the former white and the latter mainly black, with little interaction
• While several important studies have certainly been done, year after year, archaeologists and physical anthropologists, some with a superficial understanding of African-American history and culture, profit from the conduct of research on archaeological sites that influence how African Americans are defined
• Understandably, New Yorkers feared that the cultural significance often hidden from the boundaries of social contract and daily interaction would be unrecognized and overlooked and that obvious interpretations would become problematic in terms of recognition
• Seizing intellectual control has meant that the criteria for competency have been expanded to include an affinity for African-American culture past and present, and comfort with and knowledge of the politics of African descendent populations, their cultures, and their histories
• Furthermore, questions which reflect the general sentiment "should white people study black people? and an insistence on "racing skeletons" give the impression that simplistic questions are being asked rather than complex, insightful queries that also acknowledge the entangled philosophical and theoretical dilemmas archaeology must resolve with respect to the demands of the descendent communities
• As Jamieson correctly observes regarding study of the remains from the African Burial Ground: "The developments in New York City...have demonstrated that contract archaeologists are required to deal with such remains, and that a solid understanding of the historical and anthropological aspects of African-American mortuary practices is necessary before interpreting them
• According to Hodder, "It is only when we make assumptions about the subjective meanings in the minds of people long dead that we can begin to do archaeology"
• Yet, Larry McKee argues in "Commentary: Is it Futile to Try and Be Useful? Historical Archaeology and the African American Experience" that "studying African-American life from just an African-American perspective would end up one-sided and ultimately sterile
• There was a concern among African Americans that what would be deemed the important avenues of inquiry would be hollow and irrelevant for the African-descendent community
• Semantics and the use of descriptive language has been a constant theme in New York
• Not all linguistic restructuring is so easily accomplished
• Recently, scholars have attempted to avoid the use of the term master by using the term "slave holder" or "planter" rather than enslaver as the descriptive which encompasses the slave-owning aspects inherent in the plantation system
• Similar to language usage, analysis of material culture within archaeology is also an area that can be subjective and open to interpretation
• While it is difficult to interpret or extrapolate meaning from a culturally ambiguous symbol within the archaeological context, Adinkra symbolism is more appropriate to the population buried in the African Burial Ground and demonstrates the divergent perspectives which shape interpretation
• The African Burial Ground is often seen as an example of whites and blacks perceiving issues so differently as to merely exist together in physical space while operating in very different words of thought and action
• Most of the Euroamerican government officials and their consultants acted without apparent recognition that blacks understood exactly what was being attempted and had effective strategies for surmounting those obstacles
• Despite the longer track record and established credentials of Howard University's program of research in African-American bioanthropology, members of the original excavation team characterized Howard's efforts as "reverse racism," a characterization that immediately eliminated the multitude of intellectual issues
• Since New Yorkers can be extremely provincial, the choice of the part of the descendent community to remove what must have been viewed as "their" cultural resource to an environment where their interest could be understood, respected, and empowered is a dramatic indictment of the status quo
• In response to provisions set forth in Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act requiring the consultation of interested parties, a federal steering committee composed of concerned community  activists and various experts and professionals was formed to foster the dialogue between the GSA, archaeologists, and community members
• The federal steering committee meetings were among the most virulent encounters associated with the African Burial Ground project
• more often, however, it was the need for "sensitivity" toward African Americans that whites recognized, but did not understand
• The charter of the federal steering committee was not renewed once the newly constructed federal office building was occupied in November 1994, leaving many with the impression that the federal government's only interest in addressing community concerns was expediency and that clearly no lasting changes had occurred
• By disbanding the steering committee, expressed interests of the descendent community and issues which require time to resolve have been left unanswered
• Although the ancestral remains have been moved to Howard University and the federal steering committee is no longer in existence, New Yorkers have not relinquished stewardship of nor their desire to be closely involved in every aspect of the project
• Today, New York no longer has a black mayor, Gus Savage is no longer chair of the Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds, and Congress is contemplating a decrease in funding and support for CRM
• The Office of Public Education and Interpretation (OPEI) opened in March 1993 for the express purpose of informing the New York and national communities about the ongoing status of the African Burial Ground project
• The OPEI conducts on-site and off-site historical slide presentations about the African Burial Ground project and the complementary history of Africans in colonial New York, archaeological laboratory tours, and educators' symposia for teachers, researchers, and other interested persons
• The OPEI publishes Update, a quarterly newspaper that has a readership of more than 10,000 persons per issue
• The OPEI has supported Richard Brown, former steering committee member, in a community-engineered campaign to have the U.S. Postal Service issue an African Burial Ground commemorative stamp. Denied
• Media coverage of the African Burial Ground project has been extensive in documenting this unique colonial-era archaeological site
• The African Burial Ground has also been included in at least two recent historical publications, The Encyclopedia of New York City and The Historical Atlas of New York City-drawing looks more like the English countryside than 18th-century New York City
• Furthermore, most cartographers of the period also misrepresented the African Burial Ground by eliminating specific identification of the six-acre cemetery from the majority of historical maps
• Intellectual sophistication beyond the narrow limits of customary Eurocentrism requires the participation of people of diverse ethnicities in the practice of anthropology in general and of archaeology and museology in particular
• While spirituality is an issue that was at the core of the African-American struggle for control, there are several other issues of concern that African-American New Yorkers brought to the site
• Various religious communities approach the site from divergent philosophical as well as divergent political perspectives
• For African-American New Yorkers, the excavation of our ancestors has been a cathartic and wrenching experience
• Archaeology is not an end in itself
• Noted historian John Henrik Clarke characterizes the African Burial Ground as a holistic space that touches the lives of African people in this country and might touch the lives of African people all over the world
• While all African Americans are culturally affiliated, New Yorkers have an immediate and special relationship with the African Burial Grond