Hand carved caskets from Ghana are carried by pallbearers to their final resting place at New York City's African Burial Ground in October 2003.
Today we did a segment on a memorial placed at the Slave Burial Grounds in New York City, down near the site of the World Trade Center and near Wall Street.
The name "Wall Street" comes from a wall that separated colonial settlers from the Native tribes — notably the Lenape, who gave the island its name, and then were driven off.
On one side of the wall were Native tribes. On the other were settlers — Dutch and English — and the Africans they enslaved. And there was yet another population: free blacks who lived on the "wrong" side of the wall and served as a buffer between native populations and colonists. They were almost literally between a rock (wall) and a hard place.
You can read an article about the bloody "slave revolt" of 1712 here.
I lived in New York for many years, walked the area near the burial grounds, and followed the news about the remains.
If you've got a story about history revealed in your area, go on and tell it here.
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