Did you know about the New York slaves?

In 1991, building workers excavating a site for an office block in Manhattan, New York, discovered the remains of hundreds of bodies. The bones, together with other items, indicated that this was an 18th-century burial ground for slaves. Most were African- Americans, a large proportion children, and many of the adults had died in their 30s. Their ill-treatment was clear from the remains: many had signs of arthritis, rickets, syphilis or tuberculosis, and the poor state of their teeth indicated that they had suffered from malnutrition.

Americans were shocked at the revelation that New York had been part of the cruel slave trade, which most people believed had been confined to the southern states. Plans to honour the slaves by burying them in an African Burial Ground have been deferred in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001.

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