The African Burial Ground National Monument, Purnell B

• Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison remarked in 1988 that she had to write the novel Beloved, a mind-wrenching narrative of American slavery and slave resistance, because, "There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presence of, or recollect the absences of slaves...There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath, or wall, or park, or skyscraper lobby. There's no 300-foot tower, there's no small bench by the road."
• The ABGNM presents a breath of historical material and offers a unique chance to engage with the politics and cultures that created it. The monument covers three main subjects: the subject of slavery in New York from the colonial period to the state's 1827 gradual emancipation law; the methodologies physical anthropologists and archaeologists use to analyze artifacts retrieved from the burial ground and the ways those processes yield important information about Manhattan's Africans; and the political battles wages to ensure this history became memorialized and that the bones of dead Africans be given pride of place in Manhattan's public space
• The ABGNM is essentially a cemetery, a graveyard, a commemoration of the dead erected by the living. Graveyards says just as much about the buried dead as they do about the living people who build and visit those sites: the memories of those who passed that the living choose to value and honor, and the classes of the deceased deemed worthy of having marked burials
• Colonial Manhattan's sizeable black population, a mixture of free and enslaved people, had its own cemetery in the mid-1600s
• The discovery did not halt the construction, however, GSA officials removed the bones and went ahead with their plans
• Black political and cultural activists organized campaigns to stop the construction on what they considered sacred ground 
• Visitors first experience the fruit of that struggle when they enter the African Burial Ground's outdoor monument
• Entering the memorial from the north, visitors look up at a twenty-foot wall emblazoned with the West African sankofa, a symbol associated with learning from the past
• The monument's lower level is a broad circular space, its walls adorned with carvings of religious and cultural symbols from Africa and the wider world
• Off to the side of the monument's entrance, before visitors come upon the "door of return," are seven mounds of grass under which are buried crypts, each containing sixty coffins
• Upon exiting the theater, visitors enter a circular room with exhibits and presentations on the walls, centered on a life-sized diorama of the film's burial scene
• On the perimeter of the space are images and texts on the nature of slavery in Manhattan
• Another section of the exhibit focuses on the ways archaeologists marked the grave sites, studied the exhumed artifacts of skeletons, and analyzed the data to learn about black life in colonial Manhattan
• The exhibits planners also gave short shrift to the cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity that characterizes Africans, their societies, and their history
• It is here that the pitfalls of the "presentism" that led to the creation of the ABGNM are revealed: the cultural imperatives that guided the call for a public commemoration at the burial ground traded complex interpretations of colonial-era African people for less nuanced depictions of the history of "Africans" in Manhattan
• No single memorial or exhibit can adequately represent the extensive history of Africans and their progeny in America