Though the 2016 festival may be over, there are still those who have its works and impacts on their minds. Our Thinkers in Residence each went out during the festival days and engaged with the artists, the works, the public, and the street. They had their own reactions and interpretations of what they saw and experienced. As we look forward to this year’s festival, let us take the time to look back on what these Thinkers thought and read their perspectives on the past year.
Thinker in Residence: T.I. Williams
Revelations. Realizations.
Constructing.
14th Street marks the beginning of Lower Manhattan. Early planners seemed to note this by ending Broadway abruptly at 14th Street and jaggedly reconnecting it diagonally on the North end of Union Square Park at 16th street. Broadway is one of the most complicated streets in New York City. Unearthing this important throughway reveals a troubled past buried in its subterranean history.
In the late 1700s the Negro Burial Ground was closed. The area was compacted with landfill and parceled for development. In 1846, America’s first department store opened at 280 Broadway, constructed on land filled with weary black bones.[1]
Excavating.
In 1991, as part of a buildings commission, archaeologists excavated a mass grave beneath 290 Broadway.[2] They unearthed Black bodies at the epicenter of the world’s financial capital.
There are an estimated 20,000 black bodies buried across 6.6 acres underneath the Financial District. 419 bodies were exhumed, interred, and memorialized as the African Burial Ground Monument at 290 Broadway.[3] It is impossible to know how many intact bodies remain since buildings, not headstones, mark the desecrated graves. These bones bore witness to numerous slave-holding Presidents from Washington to Jefferson. These bones are familiar with Presidents ready, willing, and able to rescind the constitutional liberties that were painfully won long after these bones were living bodies.
Reading.
The 2016 Presidential Race exposed a solemn truth about race in America- with all the strides toward diversity, acceptance, and inclusivity, America lacks a unified voice regarding who is worthy of basic humanity. The live poll results read like blood on the screen, confirming that America values narcissism and celebrity more than universal human dignity.
Maybe the answer to problems of the future is in questions we ask of the past.
Building.
In the midst of the turmoil of the appointment of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the Unites States, it is time to cast these bones and divine a different America.
What do these bodies, these Black bones, calcified and brittle, with infinitesimal traces of marrow mixed with dirt and debris to form bedrock that still cry out to be called out through libations and song have to tell us?
That America is more than one story; America is as much the land of the free as it is the land of the oppressed. These bones bear witness to the first nation people who originally shaped the earth into roads. These bones bear witness to the nameless who came here- the ones whose names were taken, and the ones whose names were forsaken. These bones bear witness to inequality, inequity, and injustice, yet these bones, though broken, are still here. Maybe setting and mending these bones will disclose to us how to build something lasting- a true monument that names the unnamed, validates all legacies, and gives dignity to all humanity. In the light of all the things we have done wrong, maybe these bones can show us how to do something right.
[1] Dunlap, D. W. (1997, September 24). Return of a White Marble Palace; Buildings Agency to Occupy Old Home of Stewart’s and The Sun. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/24/nyregion/return-white-marble-palace-buildings-agency-occupy-old-home-stewart-s-sun.html
[2] Moore, C. (n.d.). New York’s Seventeenth-Century African Burial Ground in History. Retrieved from https://www.nps.gov/afbg/learn/historyculture/upload/Chris-Moore.pdf
[3] Moore, C. (n.d.). New York’s Seventeenth-Century African Burial Ground in History. Retrieved from https://www.nps.gov/afbg/learn/historyculture/upload/Chris-Moore.pdf
