At 106 years old, Benjamin Prine was the last living person born into slavery on Staten Island when he died in October 1900. He was laid to rest at the Second Asbury A.M.E. Cemetery on the borough’s North Shore, alongside the remains of an estimated 1,000 other people, many formerly enslaved and nearly all Black.
Today there’s no sign at the corner of Livermore and Forest Avenues of his grave or the burial ground that holds his remains. There are no memorials or historical markers to tell the story about how, at one time, 20 percent of Staten Island’s population consisted of enslaved people. Instead, Mr. Prine lies beneath the cracked asphalt of a strip mall parking lot. In 1950 the property where the cemetery stood was seized by the City of New York for unpaid taxes, and it was eventually sold to developers. Its existence was all but forgotten.
A staggering number of America’s Black burial grounds like the one on Staten Island have been erased from history — some the result of neglect by local governments, others through sale to developers. Gravesites on private land within the boundaries of old plantations have been deliberately hidden and forgotten. Many of those clinging to existence face the constant threat of destruction in the absence of funding to maintain them and state or federal laws to shield them from the encroachment of highways, office parks and parking lots.
Nowhere does America’s past come more alive than in our burial grounds. As they quietly mark time, they keep an unflinching record of events. They offer more than just clues to the lives of the people lying within them. They stand as remarkable displays of American art, architecture, literature, war, music, economics, landscaping, public health, death, life and — as uncomfortable as it may be to confront — injustice.
More than six million people died while enslaved within the boundaries of today’s United States, according to a recent article by a demographic historian at the University of Minnesota. Yet only a tiny fraction of their graves can be found today, too often lost beneath industrial complexes, golf courses, hospitals and even municipal buildings. Black cemeteries that were established on the land of Black churches or created by Black citizens after emancipation have faced similar struggles. Indeed, New York City’s desecration by construction extends far beyond Mr. Prine’s resting place on Staten Island.
The Negro Burying Ground, established in the mid-1600s in Harlem, now lies beneath the M.T.A.’s 126th Street Bus Depot, which closed in 2015. The 19th-century cemetery plots of the predominantly Black community of Seneca Village lie beneath Central Park. Lower Manhattan’s six-acre African Burying Ground — which was in use from the 1630s to the 1790s and contained the remains of as many as 15,000 enslaved and free people of African descent — was razed by development. It was forgotten until human remains were discovered there in 1991 during construction of a federal office building. A national monument memorializing the people buried there occupies a sliver of the former site.
Not that all that’s buried is lost. Mr. Prine’s resting place on Staten Island was rediscovered and publicized by a local documentary filmmaker in 2021, and area residents have rallied around finding ways to commemorate it. In December, Congress passed the African American Burial Grounds Act as part of the omnibus appropriations bill. The legislation will create a grant program administered by the National Park Service that promotes the identification, preservation and restoration of and research into Black cemeteries like the one on the North Shore. The legislation came at an opportune time, as community organizations across the country have arisen recently to uncover and defend these sites.
In St. Petersburg, Fla., a project funded by a University of South Florida antiracism initiative is working with the community to identify and preserve those forgotten cemeteries in the Tampa Bay area, including one that lies under part of the parking lot at the Tropicana Field stadium. In Maryland the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition filed a lawsuit in 2021 that seeks to bar the Montgomery County government from selling a parcel of land where the remains of hundreds of formerly enslaved people are interred.
In addition, the Black Cemetery Network, which connects researchers and citizens working to preserve historical Black cemeteries, is maintaining a database of burial grounds across the country in an effort to uncover and restore sites that have been wiped from the map.
Yet the African American Burial Grounds Act sets aside a mere $3 million annually in grant money — a trifle for the many struggling for funds or the ones being brought back from erasure that completely lack resources. Compare that amount with the more than $500,000 a year that Alabama spends to maintain a single Confederate memorial. The legislation offers limited protection against the threat of development, and it doesn’t safeguard Black burial grounds discovered on private property.
A handful of states don’t carry sufficient protections for lost or erased graveyards on the books to halt or fend off construction if such sites are identified. In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul vetoed the Unmarked Burial Site Protection Act, which was passed unanimously last year by the legislature. It would have required developers to cease construction upon the discovery of a burial ground, human remains or funerary objects. In her veto statement she wrote that the legislation doesn’t “appropriately protect” the interests of property owners.
Part of the problem is that the dead don’t have nearly the same lobbying muscle in the halls of power that real estate developers do. Which means the responsibility falls on the living to support community organizations and press for further legislation aimed at preserving these profound troves of America’s past.
In October, Councilwoman Kamillah Hanks unveiled legislation proposing that Livermore Avenue be renamed Benjamin Prine Way. In addition, officials hope to eventually have a small memorial built at the site to honor those who are buried there. It is a glint of progress, but the dead and their descendants should not have to rely so heavily on volunteer efforts to bring light to these hallowed grounds or resurrect them.
Greg Melville is the author of “Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of America’s Cemeteries.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.