The African Burial Ground

The African Burial Ground is a site in lower Manhattan that was unearthed in 1991. Workers constructing a government building came upon a field of human bones - half of which were those of children. This forced an acknowledgement of New York's suppressed history of slavery. The area in red is the forty acre area in which the bandaids were purchased. Forty acres is a symbolic amount of land representing the "forty acres and a mule" promised, but never delivered, to freed slaves.