Cameron Rowland, Plot, 2024. Easement, 1 acre in Beacon, New York.

Black people were prohibited from being buried in cemeteries. These prohibitions were applied to both free and enslaved black people, in both the North and the South. They were meant to make the degradation of blackness permanent. Black people were buried in unmarked slave plots and unregistered black burial grounds.

For many black people these black mass graves were extensions of black life. As Sylvia Wynter describes, black mass graves were a point of connection to the “permanent future” and the “historical life of the group.”¹ As Wynter writes of the provision grounds where slaves grew their own food, the burial plot was also “an area of experience which reinvented and therefore perpetuated an alternative world view, an alternative consciousness to that of the plantation. This world view was marginalized by the plantation but never destroyed. In relation to the plot, the slave lived in a society partly created as an adjunct to the market, partly as an end in itself.”²

Black people used funerals and burial grounds to plot escape and rebellion.³ In response, laws banning slave funerals and grave markers were passed throughout the Caribbean and the North American colonies. As former slave John Bates said, masters who prohibited slave funerals would “jes’ bury dem like a cow or a hoss, jes’ dig de hole and roll ’em in it and cover ’em up.”⁴

Unmarked black burials are frequently disinterred during real estate development. This has been the case for numerous burial grounds in New York State and throughout the country. Construction frequently continues despite these “discoveries.”

In 1790, the U.S. Census recorded nearly as many slaves in New York State as in Georgia.⁵ The land that Dia Art Foundation currently owns in Beacon, New York, was owned by slave owners and slave traders from 1683 until the abolition of slavery in New York in 1827.⁶

The easement between Dia Art Foundation and Plot Inc. conveys the rights to a one-acre section of the institution’s property to Plot Inc. for the purpose of protecting the graves of enslaved people who may have been buried there. This burial ground easement runs with the land and requires Dia and all future owners to relinquish the rights to use, disturb, or develop this section of the property.

The plot will remain unmarked. It will degrade the value of the institution’s property. It challenges the assumed absence of black burials on sites of enslavement by assuming their presence.

1. Sylvia Wynter, “Black Metamorphosis” (unpublished manuscript), 57, 87.
2. Wynter, “Black Metamorphosis,” 53.
3. Wynter, “Black Metamorphosis,” 85, 87.
4. “Interview with John Bates,” Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 1 (Washington, DC: Federal Writers’ Project, Works Progress Administration, 1941), 53.
5. Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1790 (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 1908), 8.
6. Correlation of property ownership records for Dutchess County Tax Parcel ID 130200-5954-41-605699-00 and Tax Parcel ID 130200-5954-49-608543-00 with the Northeast Slavery Records Index (https://nesri.commons.gc.cuny.edu/).

November 2024

Music

Paths of Sound

Forever New

Cologne Jazzweek

Back to Soweto