Welcome To My World: In Hunts Point, Bx: ENSLAVED & NATIVE AMERICAN CEMETERY NEEDS OUR ATTENTION!

Tuesday 28 May 2013

In Hunts Point, Bx: ENSLAVED & NATIVE AMERICAN CEMETERY NEEDS OUR ATTENTION!

The cemetery for African and Indian slaves was demolished, but a whites-only cemetery was preserved. Those interred in the whites-only cemetery were mostly from the slave-owning families that controlled much of Hunts Point during the 18th and 19th centuries. They include the Hunts — who gave Hunts Points its name — and the Leggetts and the Tiffanys, who still have Bronx streets named after them.

Slaves who died in Hunts Point were laid to rest in the segregated slave plot across the road from the white cemetery.

And there weren’t just a tiny number of them.

For the past 100 years, South Bronx residents have unknowingly held picnics and cavorted over the bones of buried slaves.

That’s the startling discovery teachers and students at a Hunts Point public school have made: They located a burial ground for Indian and African slaves that city officials demolished more than 100 years ago to make way for a nearby park.

Everyone at Public School 48 has taken up the cause of proper recognition for those forgotten slaves buried in Joseph Rodman Drake Park, a few blocks away from their school.