When I learned that the African Burial Ground had been discovered in New York City, I began to follow and research the story. In October 1991, the excavation crew for a new $275 million federal building on lower Broadway unearthed 419 human skeletons, the remains of a small fraction of the slaves who had built much of the city, including the wall that once defined Wall Street. In the 17th- and 18th-centuries, that site had been part of a cemetery where the bodies of more than 15,000 black people rested.
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