Newsday from New York, New York • 79

I 60 in i mi ini MMMdttiMiiaawa AVI I cdIF ttlhlCB The first black people arrived here in the early 1 600s. Slaves of the Dutch, some were freed and became owners of what is now Greenwich Village. I NEW YORK NEWSDAY. THURSDAY. FEBRUARY 6.

1992 PART II era! office building began, this site is rich in the history of African-American New York. Before there was Little Italy there was Little Africa. In fact, there were several black neighborhoods in lower Manhattan from the end of the Revolutionary War until the generation before the Civil War. Most people think that black history in this dty begins and ends in Harlem, says Sherrill WilBon, an urban anthropologist who has taught at New York University, Cornell University and the New School. Wilson, who currently conducts six black-history walking tours in lower Manhattan, adds, African-Americans lived in Manhattan for three-hundred years before they moved uptown.

African-American history in New York begins on the southern tip of Manhattan, and as with the rest of the population, over the years there was a gradual migration northward. In the 1620s, shortly after the first 40 Dutch settlers arrived, 11 enslaved black men who may have been kidnaped off a Portuguese vessel were brought to New York (then New Netherlands). In 1644 these original black New Yorkers sued for their freedom. On Feb. 25 of that year the Dutch began to issue about 30 land grants and half freedom to some of the petitioners, who immediately began dealing and cultivating the area.

Paulo DAngola, Simon Congo, Big Manuel, Little Manuel, Anthony Portuguese and Jan Francisco, among others, became the first colonial land owners of what is now Greenwich Village (even if it was still a swampy wilderness) and much more. The so-called Land of the Blacks was a solid section of Manhattan, totaling 500 to 600 acres, ranging south to Chinatown and north to 34th Street and Herald Square. The land grants occurred during the height of the Indian Wars, says writer Christopher Moore, who can trace his lineage back to the first black New Yorkers and is preparing a book about his family. Because of the ferodty of the Indian attacks, Moore explains, no white farmer would live there. The Dutch gave i By Rodger Taylor THE SKELETONS lie in coffin-shaped dents in the dirt and sediment, their bones dark with age, their caskets now only discolored traces in the earth.

There are at least 168 of them, and at least a third are the size of children. Down a wooden ladder 20 feet below street level at Reade and Broadway, a group of archeologists led by Mike Parrington labors under a large plastic tent. In a mqjor find, the crew has discovered skeletal remains of what was known in the 1700s as the Negro Burying Ground. This is a significant, unique site. Its the only Eighteenth -Century black urban burial ground ever found, Parrington says, moving carefully through the area of the federally sponsored dig.

This cemetery was five to six acres large, extending all the way to City Hall. Its documented that slaves were interred here at least since 1712." For much of that century, the burial ground for blacks was just outside dty limits and thus deemed a great place for the African-American dead (it is estimated that as many as 20,000 bodies were buried here). As New York City expanded uptown and well past Reade Street the land became valuable. In 1790 the Negro Burying Ground was taken over by commercial interests and was built over. Discovered last year when excavation for a new fed- Archeologist Will Forbes dusts a skeleton at a federal building site, the 1700s Negro Burying Ground.

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