It’s bad enough that some of the bodies that may be in those tombs were discriminated against in life. But now, they’re being discriminated against in death.
In 1991 archaeologists uncovered several graves on a plot in lower Manhattan. These burials were discovered during completion of a land survey conducted on behalf of the US General Services Administration (GSA), which planned to construct a government office tower at the location. Initial archival research had suggested that the building’s proposed location might be the site of a colonial-era cemetery. The survey was undertaken in compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 (NHPA), which mandates protection of historic properties and burial remains at proposed building sites utilizing federal funds. The survey confirmed that the location was the former site of the “Negros Buriel Ground,” a municipal cemetery for the city’s African and African American population that dated to the colonial period.
This site is now the African Burial Ground National Monument, administered by the US National Park Service. Its status as a national monument reflects the federal government’s belief that it has special “historic or scientific interest.”1 Yet this burial ground holds further significance still. Its disposition proved foundational to direct-to-consumer genetics in the United States.
Commercial genetic analysis is aptly regarded as an offshoot of the Human Genome Project, completed in 2003. However, an origin story for genetic testing that begins with single nucleotide polymorphisms (“SNPs”) or supercomputing can only partly account for why this analysis became important in African American cultural politics. As we will see, the controversy that transpired over excavation methods and research priorities at the centuries-old African Burial Ground shaped subsequent reconciliation projects incorporating DNA that aimed to address the history of chattel slavery and, in so doing, reframe the racial politics of the moment.
The African Burial Ground initiative illustrates how the social life of DNA is forged both technically and conceptually. Although the remains excavated at the site were analyzed using several methodologies, most notable was a then-novel use of genetic analysis. Second, research undertaken at the site would become paradigmatic for how genetics could be used to create new identity and reconstruct the past. Although studies of ancient genes (aDNA) had been conducted in the late 1980s—beginning with research outlined in Nature by geneticist Bryan Sykes and colleagues demonstrating the ability to amplify DNA obtained from bone—the African Burial Ground project was among the first and most public uses of aDNA analysis in the United States.2 Here, genetic comparison was used to infer the ancestral associations and ethnic affiliations of the individuals buried at the site. Third, the undertaking was the inspiration for subsequent commercial endeavors. The African Burial Ground project led to the formation of African Ancestry, one of the earliest genetic-ancestry-testing ventures, when Rick Kittles, then a geneticist working on the project, converted the research techniques utilized in the enterprise into a successful business.
The graves unearthed in Manhattan in February 1991 were part of a municipal cemetery for the city’s African and African American population dating to at least the late 1600s. This segregated cemetery, once known as the “Negros Buriel Ground,” had been established for blacks in New Amsterdam (later New York), who were not permitted to bury their dead within the city’s walls by Dutch (and later English) colonial authorities. Under a policy that has retrospectively been characterized as “mortuary apartheid,” throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the burials of free and bonded Africans were relegated to this isolated ravine located outside municipal boundaries.3 By the nineteenth century, the burial ground and the surrounding area had been incorporated into the city limits and covered with landfill in order to make way for the expansion and development of lower Manhattan—an area that now includes New York’s City Hall, the Wall Street financial district, and the exclusive Tribeca neighborhood.
While both government officials and the New Jersey–based archaeological salvage company Historic Conservation and Interpretation—the company conducting the land survey—were aware of the presence of the graveyard, the uncovering of hundreds of intact burials at the site was nevertheless surprising because archaeologists hypothesized that most remains would have been destroyed long ago. As a Historic Conservation report explained, the company’s archaeologists believed that subsequent construction and development on and around the site in the years since its closure in the 1790s had “obliterated any remains . . . within the historic bounds of the cemetery.”4 Accordingly, the conservation company foresaw no regulatory hurdles to the smooth start of the GSA’s construction process.
Historic Conservation’s pre-construction survey of the cemetery was conducted using the so-called “coroner’s method.”5 With this type of removal, the graves were unearthed using large construction machinery, with little consideration given to conservation of the remains, the composition of the burial, or the material culture included in the gravesites. Having been gathered in the pell-mell fashion characteristic of the coroner’s approach, the contents of the graves were then transported to the laboratory of the Metropolitan Forensic Anthropology Team (MFAT) based at Lehman College, a campus of the City University of New York. To make matters worse, after reports of Historic Conservation’s rushed excavation came to light, the company’s archaeologists, hired to discern the salvageability of the African Burial Ground, were accused of contributing to its destruction.6
News of the coarse treatment of the burials angered the local community. Activists, politicians, and preservationists were dismayed that they were not immediately informed of the discovery of the cemetery and only learned of its existence through the media. Community groups and cultural organizations, including one that called itself Descendants of the African Burial Ground, were particularly outraged by what they saw as the state-sanctioned disruption of sacred ground. Some attributed the poor handling of the graveyard to racial prejudice. State Senator David A. Paterson (later governor of New York), who organized the Task Force for the Oversight of the African Burial Ground, for example, protested: “It’s bad enough that some of the bodies that may be in those tombs were discriminated against in life. But now, they’re being discriminated against in death.”7 Numerous efforts sprang up to bring attention to these grievances and correct them, ranging from mainstream politicking and protests to the enactment of African funerary rites at the burial-ground site to settle disturbed souls.
Though they were of varied ideological orientations, the burial ground’s stakeholders were mostly united in their intention to intervene in the process to determine the future of the gravesite. To do so, they fastened upon a provision of the National Historic Preservation Act that prescribed local communities’ consultation with respect to historic locations. Activists, including Ayo Harrington, Elombe Brath, Miriam Francis, and Earl Maitland, demanded (and received) a role in the excavation and administration of the graveyard.8
In response to public outcry, the excavation of the African Burial Ground proceeded using the more deliberate and time-intensive methods of scholarly archaeological practice—as opposed to forensic or commercial archaeology. With the former, the remains were “intricately measured and delicately removed from the land,” in contrast to the rushed pace of the coroner’s method.9 Changes in technique and in the decision-making process, however, did not fully diminish the bad faith that had been established between the GSA and the local community. Reacting to reports of the new mode of excavation, Senator Paterson conspiratorially opined to the press that while he was heartened that the work would now be more carefully executed, he was “not assured that this was the original intention” of the planners.10
Neither did the change of course prevent continued damage to the remains: despite new procedural safeguards, on February 14, 1992, an employee working for New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission witnessed human bones being jostled from gravesites, and other remains lying in the bucket of a backhoe. Furthermore, despite the employ of more disciplined excavation methods, several burials were destroyed when a construction worker accidentally poured concrete on the graves. There were also reports that remains were being improperly conserved. At Lehman College’s lab, bones from the burials were allegedly wrapped in newspaper rather than in acid-free, conservation-standard materials. These remains were reportedly also kept “under improper environmental conditions” and were “inadequately stored on top of each other.”11
The haphazard handling of the burials prompted Mayor David Dinkins—the first black American to hold New York City’s highest office—to confront federal authorities. The mayor’s charge that the GSA had violated the National Historic Preservation Act—as well as its Memorandum of Agreement with the city and its historic and landmark preservation agencies—spurred national congressional hearings. Congressman Gus Savage, a Democrat from Illinois, who was sympathetic to the perspective of Mayor Dinkins and the activist community, helmed a subcommittee that ruled that the GSA (and, by association, Historic Conservation and Interpretation) had violated the NHPA by not developing an adequate scientific research plan for the site and ordered that work there cease. As a consequence of activist foment and political pressure on both local and national levels, excavation at the African Burial Ground was permanently stopped in July 1992.12 By this time, remains from more than 419 burials (of 15,000 to 20,000 estimated total burials at the cemetery) had been transported to the MFAT laboratory at Lehman College.13
Emboldened by their victory in ending the excavation process, some stakeholders now made additional demands. They insisted on being consulted about the planned study of the burials, and supported research that could yield information about the history of the individuals buried there, and about the communities they may have originated from before being transported to the Americas for enslavement. It was hoped that such a research agenda could produce information about the national or ethnic origins of the buried persons (and, by association, those of some black Americans). Additionally, the activists lobbied for Michael Blakey, a leading physical anthropologist and an African American, to take over efforts to study and conserve the African Burial Ground remains. Blakey in turn encouraged the activists’ stewardship of the site.
It is notable, however, that some members of the local community were not solely or even primarily interested in the African Burial Ground’s historical and scientific potential. A significant faction saw the site first and foremost as a cemetery, and therefore a sacred site. Glen C. Campbell, an African American architect who consulted on the research design for the African Burial Ground study, stressed this point in a letter to the GSA. He wrote, “The human remains and the associated artifacts are severely important, but the place is sacred. No one would dare suggest digging ten or twelve feet below grade at the Arlington National Cemetery and moving the remains. . . . To bury the remains elsewhere will be nothing short of disrespect for the community and the sacredness of their ancestors’ contributions.”14 In recognition of the site’s spiritual significance, activists initiated a vigil of drumming, chanting, and prayer.
In October 1992, Blakey was named scientific director of the research project, and early the next year the excavated African Burial Ground remains were transferred from the MFAT in New York City to the W. Montague Cobb Research Laboratory at Howard University, a private, historically black college in Washington, DC. The remains would be stored and studied in accordance with a research design plan drafted by Blakey, approved by both government agencies and the local concerned community, and funded with $6 million from the GSA.15 The historical and social merit of the African Burial Ground was certified by its designation as a National Historic Landmark that same year. Among researchers, however, conflicting interpretations of the site’s historical and social value would remain.
At the Lehman lab, the method of analysis consisted primarily of osteology—the scientific measurement of the skeletal remains—and the broad classification of them into several categories, including stature, age, sex, and race.16 Male and female bones largely cluster into distinct weight and length classes. Moreover, some forensic osteologists contend that blacks have longer femurs than whites and Asians and, therefore, bone length has been used for black versus nonblack racial classification.17 This forensic approach was and remains standard practice among many physical anthropologists and was the perspective that the MFAT scientists brought to the research project.18
Other physical anthropologists, however, including those at Howard University who would become involved in the African Burial Ground project, found the forensic mode of analysis and interpretation inadequate to the historical significance of the cemetery. Detractors of the Lehman approach, including Blakey, the burial ground’s new research director, contended that these studies were unduly preoccupied with the gross racial classification of the sort employed for criminal justice purposes.19 He further maintained that this methodology reduced the individuals in the burials to “narrow typologies” and thinly “descriptive variables,” and thereby “disassociated” them from their “particular culture or history.”20 In an article with Cheryl J. LaRoche, a conservation consultant for the US National Park Service, Blakey asserted that the Lehman scientists’ forensic approach—which focused on gross classification—severely “underestimated the enormous analytic value of the cemetery site.”21
Howard researchers, by contrast, shared the conviction that the cemetery was an exceptional discovery. The Howard team’s research proposal noted that the site was “the earliest excavated municipal cemetery in the United States” and “the largest African American archaeological population currently known.” Blakey would expound on the site’s importance in his concluding report on the African Burial Ground project, stating, “The skeletons, artifacts, and documents of the people buried [in the cemetery] tell volumes about their lives.”22 If questions about the burials were aptly framed, Blakey and his colleagues believed, details about the preparation or positioning of bodies in the burials and the placement of funerary ritual objects found at the site, combined with scientific analysis of the remains, could open a rare window on the experiences of blacks in the Americas and perhaps shed light on their ethnic origins as well.
This disagreement over research methodologies reflected ongoing debates in the discipline of anthropology over whether “descriptive” or “analytical” studies of skeletal remains were most useful for reconstructing the past. Descriptive (or forensic) studies are those that primarily involve “sorting” and “identification” without concern for the “broader theoretical context.”23 Today, anthropologists rely on both analytical and descriptive approaches.
In New York, community members took up their own positions in the descriptive versus analytical debate. Activists associated with the Descendants of the African Burial Ground complained that the approach taken by researchers at the MFAT lab amounted to the “biological racing” of their ancestors’ bodies;24 they expressed vehement opposition to classification that they believed would “reduce their ancestors’ social identity to skin color.”25 The lens through which the burials would be interpreted—not to mention the cultural background of the scientists doing the interpreting—had been a key motivator for activists calling for the transfer of the remains from MFAT to Howard. Blakey engaged MFAT lab director James V. Taylor directly on this point, writing to him in December of 1992 to express his dissatisfaction with what he deemed the Lehman-affiliated researchers’ unnecessary reliance on racial categories. Notably, this exchange was also an opportunity for Blakey to express why he felt the MFAT’s demands for further involvement in the research should be denied. Responding to Taylor’s prior correspondence, Blakey wrote,
Your contention that race estimation is essential to determining age and sex is usually supported by researchers of a previous era in the history of anthropology. . . . “Races,” such as “negroids, caucasoids, and mongoloids,” which you wish to apply have come to be understood as folk taxonomy, social constructs imposed on a natural world whose genetic variation is far more complex. . . . The study of specific population affinities is more important and accurate than gross racial classification.26
A compromise was proposed in which the MFAT would be allowed to complete its work, following which the remains would be turned over to the Howard team for analytical and interpretive analysis.
Criticism of the “biological racing” of the remains also suggested awareness on the part of both activists and scholars of the historical use of biometrics—the measurement and analysis of human characteristics as a means of grouping individuals—to bolster scientific racism, and thus the potential for flatly descriptive work to yield prejudiced interpretations of the burials. For, as Stephen Jay Gould and numerous others have documented, the comparative “mismeasurement” of bodies, from lung capacity to crania to genes—with white bodies serving as the norm against which all others are measured—has long been employed to advance erroneous claims about black inferiority.27
Against the backdrop of this bitter legacy of discriminatory biological research, supporters of the Howard team’s analytical method of interpretation sought to upend this history by using biometrics, alongside other forms of scientific and humanistic analysis, to glean new information about the physical effects of slavery as well as the African origins of some of the earliest black Americans. Indeed, for the self-described “descendent community,” a name suggested by the Howard researchers, the discovery of the African Burial Ground represented a stirring possibility—a retreat from designation by “skin color” alone and the stigmatizing concept of race, for both their “ancestors” and themselves.
For some supporters of the analytical approach to the African Burial Ground remains, the stakes were very high, for this also presented an opportunity to restore ethnic identities to a racialized (and racially subjugated) community. Historian Michael Gomez has shown that the Africans brought to the Americas via the tortuous journey known as the Middle Passage “exchanged their country marks” in a process of compelled racialization. This process, Gomez writes, was a transition from an “ethnically based identity directly tied to a specific land to an identity predicated on the concept of race.”28 Although some enslaved Africans would strive to retain distinct practices and identities that reflected the perseverance of their “country marks,” they nevertheless were compelled by their states of bondage “to learn the significance of race,” and to cope with their racialized caste position in slave societies such as the United States.29 In walking a fine line in which they contested the “biological racing” of the remains, yet advocated for the use of similar scientific techniques toward the construction of fuller interpretations of the slave past, the activists and Howard researchers engaged in a quest for the reversal of the racialization produced by slavery—if not its enduring effects.
More specifically, the politics on the ground of this Manhattan cemetery split hairs between race and ethnicity. The activists sought to restore pre-enslavement identity to the individuals interred at the burial ground. This restoration was of benefit to the descendant community and potentially to the body politic as well. The distinction between descriptive and analytical approaches to interpretation, between “biological racing” and the restoration of specific details of African origins that we might describe as ethnicity, was the backdrop for the employ of scientific analysis that would in a few years’ time be born out in genetic ancestry testing.
The eventual siting of the African Burial Ground research at Howard University marked a fundamental change in the framing of how and why the research was conducted. The question undergirding the investigations carried out at the MFAT lab could be summarized as “Are these the bones of blacks?”30 The Howard researchers, to the contrary, sought answers to a more extensive set of questions, including “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?”31 In posing these questions about the remains, Blakey’s team hoped to use these rare remnants of black colonial life as an opportunity to more fully detail knowledge about how those buried at the African cemetery in lower Manhattan lived and died.32 At the Howard lab, in other words, the research orientation was shifted from an epistemology of racial classification to an epistemology of ethnicity (and therefore, also ancestry).33 Indeed, the African Burial Ground researchers’ write-up of the study noted their interest in discerning the “rainbow of [African] ethnicities” that might be found at the cemetery. Analysis of the remains was thus broadened to include a panoply of social and historical interpretation that might render “biological evidence of [the] geographical and macroethnic affiliations” of enslaved Africans in colonial New York.34 Howard University’s Cobb laboratory, a research site with a long history of comparative anthropological and archaeological study of African and African American remains, was a fitting location for the African Burial Ground project. It was also the case that this project promised to bring both funding and renown to the Washington, DC–based institution—and to its researchers.