From: fano@zoo1.ils.nwu.edu (Andy Fano)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american
Subject: Savage: Dig at slave cemetery 'disgrace'
Date: 28 Jul 92 18:24:53 GMT
Reply-To: fano@zoo1.ils.nwu.edu (Andy Fano)
Organization: The Institute for the Learning Sciences


UPI reports that:

	 "U.S. Rep. Gus Savage, D-Ill., emerged Monday from
the site of a 200-year-old black slave cemetery discovered 25 feet
undergound and angrily called excavation efforts by whites a "disgrace"
that should cease immediately.
	More than 400 bodies have been exhumed from the cemetery, discovered
during excavation for a 34-story federal office building in Lower
Manhattan, just blocks from City Hall.
	Most of the construction on the building has been completed, but
black activists want the federal government to halt progress on a
parking lot and four-story pavillion that's still planned for part of
the site where up to 250 bodies may still be buried.
	Savage toured the site after the Congressional Subcommittee on Public
Buildings and Grounds, which he chairs, heard testimony for the first
time on whether the cemetery should be designated a national historical
landmark.
	"I'm more upset now than ever," Savage said angrily after touring
the site. "Whites won't let blacks live in peace nor will they now even
let us rest in peace at our burial sites. This is a disgrace."
	Savage, who canceled a news conference planned for after the tour,
was particularly incensed that most of those involved in the excavation
effort were white.
	"I think this is a disgrace to have all these young white folks over
here picking over the dead bones of our ancestors and the handful of
blacks (anthropologists and archaeologists) are more concerned about
their so-called profession than their heritage," Savage said.
	"If this were a Jewish burial ground, they would not be down here
picking over these bones," Savage said, adding that mass cemeteries in
Nazi concentration camps have been made into memorials.
	"They have not disturbed those at rest," he said. "The Holocaust
is no comparison to the hundred of millions of our ancestors who have
been killed over the centuries."
	Savage said he doesn't want the federal General Services
Administration, which is funding the building project, to do anything at
the site.
	"That's the problem -- they're doing something with it when they need
to respect us enough to leave us alone, just leave us alone," Savage
said.
	At a morning hearing at the U.S. Court of International Trade in
Manhattan, Mayor David Dinkins called the cemetery "an unparalled
archaelogical and cultural resource which has already opened a window
onto the lives of New York's earliest African residents."
	"The memory and legacy of our African pioneers deserves better,"
the mayor said in repeating his call that additional excavation be
suspended at once.
	"We should not disturb any more human remains without a clear
understanding of the consequences and a careful review of all options,"
Dinkins said.
	Initially called the Negro Cemetery, the cemetery was the final
resting place for enslaved Africans who died from about 1690 to 1792,
said Rodger Taylor, on Manhattan, one of several advocates for the
cemetery's preservation.
	Ninty percent of blacks in the city at that time were enslaved
Africans, with the remainder being freed blacks, Taylor added.
	The federal government knew that the cemetery was there, but believed
it had been covered by city landfills and would not affect construction
of the building, Taylor said.
	"They thought that the burial site had been destroyed from past
building. But to the surprise of everyone, there were many more remains
than anticipated," he said.