History is the codpiece worn by those who count themselves as the better of humanity consequently its ideology grants permission to brutalize those it has decided are subhuman. Then blots them out from the historical record. David Kutz’s four-part documentary The African Burial Ground: An American Discovery 1994 clearly illustrates this particular facet. His portrayal of the stunning discovery of 18th century early New York’s “Negro’s Burial Ground” is thought provoking and emotionally charged. (Kutz 1994) This remarkable find sheds light on New Amsterdam’s historical prejudice gaining insight into the lives of African slaves through their skeletal remains. This production offers a glance into the plight of New York’s contemporary citizens who fought the government in order to recognize, uphold, and win honor for those who laboured to build one of America’s greatest cities.
Ironically the burial ground’s discovery came from a land of no significance to prime, for an intended thirty-four-story federal office building. An environmental impact statement set off archeological test excavations, by producing an 18th century map delivering necessity to substantiate or disprove survival of a “Negro’s Burial Ground” (Kutz 1994).
Results, by a single cursory document, came out from Republican Alley. In early October of 1991 “eleven bodies had been found” (Kutz 1994). When excavation ceased, due to community and political complications, more than four hundred men, women and children were exhumed from the oldest cemetery containing African Americans in the United States.
Outlandishly the near by Collect Pond was meticulously documented as it served the Dutch as a fresh water supply, through British rule, to a sewer. In 1811 the pond wa...
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...-thousand “individuals’” in what was called the "Negroes Burial Ground" to its modern-day resting place the national historic landmark, “The African Burial Ground” (Kutz 1994).
Slavery undoubtedly mars those who suffered its cruelty. David Kutz proves slavery’s affect scars future generations whether they are the descendants’ of the captives or progeny of the free. History’s superiority scarcely mentioned the “Negro’s Burial Ground” while in contrast modern day members of New York fought in defense and reverently won respect for those “individuals” now buried in "The African Burial Ground” (Kutz 1994). However there are other American historical battles yet to be fought. For example, Americans still celebrate Columbus Day.
Works Cited
The African Burial Ground: An American Discovery. 1994. Produced and directed by David Kutz. Brooklyn: Kutz Television, Inc.
Vaughan, Joyce. "John (J.W.) "Jack" Hinckley, Sr." Find a Grave. N.p., 31 Jan 2008. Web. 19 Apr
Writing around the same time period as Phillips, though from the obverse vantage, was Richard Wright. Wright’s essay, “The Inheritors of Slavery,” was not presented at the American Historical Society’s annual meeting. His piece is not festooned with foot-notes or carefully sourced. It was written only about a decade after Phillips’s, and meant to be published as a complement to a series of Farm Credit Administration photographs of black Americans. Wright was not an academic writing for an audience of his peers; he was a novelist acceding to a request from a publisher. His essay is naturally of a more literary bent than Phillips’s, and, because he was a black man writing ...
While the formal abolition of slavery, on the 6th of December 1865 freed black Americans from their slave labour, they were still unequal to and discriminated by white Americans for the next century. This ‘freedom’, meant that black Americans ‘felt like a bird out of a cage’ , but this freedom from slavery did not equate to their complete liberty, rather they were kept in destitute through their economic, social, and political state.
Kennewick Man has started and added to an immense saga about the ethics involved in excavating and studying the remains of other that passed away long and not so long ago. Kennewick man being one of the hottest topics of the media during the mid-nineties has proved to be one of the most trying ethical dilemmas of our time. An ethical dilemma as described by Kelley Ross Ph. D is a “conflict between the rightness or wrongness of the actions and the goodness or badness of the consequences of those actions” (www.friesien.com). In the case of the Kennewick man the coalition of the tribes are trying to do what is best for their culture and belief by having the Kennewick man buried and the scientists who want to study this strange humanoid that has shown up on the banks of the Columbia River and are acting how they believe this should be handled, with careful study and the need to find the knowledge that this skeleton can provide about America nine millennia ago; and here is the problem that has been floating around this case for little over a decade.
A human being is a complicated entity of a contradictory nature, where creative and destructive, virtuous and vicious are interwoven. Each of us has gone through various kinds of struggle at least once in a lifetime, ranging from everyday discrepancies to worldwide catastrophes. There are always different causes and reasons that trigger these struggles, however, there is common ground for them as well: people are different, even though it is a truism no one seems to be able to realize this statement from beyond the bounds of one’s self and reach out to approach the Other. The concept of the Other is dominant in Frederick Douglass’s text “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro”, for it determines the main conflict and illuminates the issue of intolerance and even blasphemy regarding the attitude of white Americans towards Negroes. The text was written as a speech to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence and delivered at Rochester’s Corinthian Hall on July 5, 1852.
For most American’s especially African Americans, the abolition of slavery in 1865 was a significant point in history, but for African Americans, although slavery was abolished it gave root for a new form of slavery that showed to be equally as terrorizing for blacks. In the novel Slavery by Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon he examines the reconstruction era, which provided a form of coerced labor in a convict leasing system, where many African Americans were convicted on triumphed up charges for decades.
Harris, Leslie M. “In The Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863. New York: University of Chicago Press, 2003. http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/317749.html
This burial ground is the final resting place of not only Church members and Yellow Fever victims, but Benjamin Franklin and 4 other signers of the Declaration of Independence! Though not many historical events other than burials occurred here, the burial ground itself has undergone many eventful changes. In 1977, the burial ground closed due to a lack of funding, among other reasons. It reopened in 2003 after a brief but extremely beneficial restoration project. In this project, many tombstones were repaired or completely remade. Along with this renovation, updates are made to the burial ground on both Benjamin Franklin’s birthday and the burial site’s anniversary. An example is the brick path installed around Benjamin Franklin’s grave, which was added in December 2005 to celebrate his 300th birthday. More of these updates and renovations will likely occur as the years go
1) Author Tony Horwitz discusses many topics and events that are essential to understanding the history of America. These topics and events include European exploration in the New World, the massacre of the native population and its replacement by the importation of African slaves, and how the winners ultimately write history based on their subjective views and the myths that come along with nonobjective documentation of events that occur. Each of these concepts is related to one another and are important because they contributed to America’s creation and existence today.
Many perceptions of Mississippian see a collection of highly stratified, chiefdom-level societies. While this is not immediately incorrect, there are inaccuracies in these assumptions. It is important to recognize the impact of secondary burials on the context of a body, as well as analyzing burial data against both data from the site it had been collected from as well as from other Mississippian sites. By doing so, one can -- hopefully -- find the conclusion that most accurately represents the truth of the traditions practiced by indigenous peoples instead of the conclusion that makes the most sense to one’s personal experiences.
As it is on most nights, the place is packed, and because it is one of the few unsegregated ballrooms in New York, with a mixed crowd, it is both reasonable and ironic that the person I meet has chosen this spot. He was deported seven years ago by the United States Government, convicted of mail fraud, and slipped hidden into Harlem tonight to see some old compatriots, including Van Der Zee, before departing to Canada before dawn, and then to live in London. He has spent these last years in Jamaica, where he has broadened the presence of his Universal Negro Improvement Association, UNIA. It was taking photographs of UNIA members and the Back to Africa Movement, and creating a UNIA calendar in 1924, that Van Der Zee came to know Marcus Garvey. The Jamaican born leader of the Back to Africa movement has encouraged all African Americans to return to Africa. A short, heavy, dark skinned man, he greets us with his familiar refrain, “One God! One Aim! One Destiny.” When he is told by the wryly smiling Van Der Zee that I am writing for an article for The Crisis, he becomes angry and agitated. He bellows that my boss, the illustrious W.E.B. Du Bois, is “purely a white man’s nigger” who despises him because of his dark skin and Caribbean heritage. For his part, Du Bois has considers Garvey to be “dictatorial, domineering, inordinately vain, and very suspicious.” He was appalled by Garvey choosing to meet and embrace the Ku Klux Klan some years ago because they celebrate how whites take pride in their race and because blacks need to do the same with theirs. To Mr. Du Bois, this embracing of separate black and white worlds is an acknowledgement by Garvey and his followers that African Americans can never be equal to whites - something my editor will never
The African Burial Ground National Monument and Museum (NPS) is New York’s earliest known African American cemetery, which dates back to 1626. The burial ground was in-active use from 1626 to the late 1700s. The site contains the remains of 419 African American men, women and children in what was the largest colonial-era cemetery for free and enslaved Africans. The burial ground was closed in the 1790s, and was later divided into different sections to be put up for sale. The site was then covered with numerous layers of building developments until it was rediscovered in 1991. All other burial sites had already been destroyed over the years by the construction of other buildings. In 1993, the site was designated a National Historic Landmark
One particular grave, 6-0099, contained the skeletons of four individuals a male, female and two children.2 Using DNA testing they were able to determine the grave was of a father, mother and two young boys. The father is believed to be forty- to sixty-years-old, the mother thirty-five- to fifty-years-old, one boy four- to five-years-old...
As the database will be used for research as well as town-planning by a wide variety of people, including historians, local councils, genealogists, sociologists and epidemiologists, it is anticipated that it will include not only information about the graveyards themselves, but also the buildings, individual gravestones and the records of people buried there. [Emphasis added]
As portrayed above, poverty is the misery of life. “No gravestone, no name, no identifying mark of any kind. The burying-ground is merely a huge waste of hummocky earth, like a derelict building-lo...