NEW YORK — U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman said Monday that he plans to reintroduce long-stalled legislation to build a museum at the Colonial-era African Burial Ground near Foley Square in lower Manhattan, a site that is believed to hold the remains of more than 15,000 free and enslaved Africans.
The African Burial Ground hosts a decade-old visitors’ center and received National Historic Landmark status in 1993, two years after excavators discovered the 7-acre burial ground during work on a planned federal government office tower.
Goldman, a New York City Democrat, described the burial ground as a “stark and sobering reminder of the fact that New York and America was built by Black Americans and, to a great extent, on the back of Black Americans.”
