Review of “A Burial Ground And Its Dead Are Given Life,” by Edward Rothstein (from the New York Times’ Art section):

Rothstein’s article discusses a museum created when a burial site of black New Yorkers was found in Lower Manhattan. Identified as being formed in 1755 and called the “Negro Burial Ground,” it provided great insight into the history of black people living in New York during an age of slavery. Months after the discovery of some 419 bodies, a visitor’s site was constructed to express the burial ceremonies of black culture in their historical context. It wasn’t until 1993 that the site was placed on the National Register of Historic Places and protected as a national monument. In 2007, a sculpture was created and placed the site in a historical as well as a museum framework.
The museum itself consists of a class-room, a video, and a shop featuring models, statues, displays, recordings of songs and chants, and photographs; outside of the museum is the actual burial ground where there are many raised mounds where the coffins and bodies had been buried. Rothstein describes a display with several scrapbooks detailing the amount of political activism it took to preserve the site, something he found to be a bit exaggerated. In keeping with this cynicism, Rothstein describes his feeling that the museum was often times prejudiced and expressed the deplorable condition these specific slaves had endured as being debatable. Specifically, he notes that many of the skeletons feature signs of malnutrition, which should have been compared with an average white worker’s skeleton to put the malnutrition into a fairer plane. Rather than simply stating that these people had endured far more hardships than any other societal group of the time. In my opinion, this is a bit callous of a statement; the men and women buried at this site were on the lowest rung of society, therefore it is natural they would not have the healthy skeleton of their white counter-parts. Granted there are individual cases in which this would be false, but the overwhelming majority of cases would follow this patte