The largest known colonial burial ground for people of African descent in the United States — both free and enslaved — is in New York City. That burial ground in Lower Manhattan is a national park and monument that commemorates the forgotten and brutal history of slavery in New York City. But it’s far from the only site of this complex past.
Producer Leina Gabra takes us to Flatbush, Brooklyn in New York, where a group of community activists are uncovering the history that laid below a corner of their neighborhood.
An Empty Lot in Brooklyn
Nearly every Saturday between noon and two o’clock, you can find Flatbush resident Samantha Bernardine sweeping trash from the corner of Bedford Avenue and Church Avenue in Brooklyn, NY. She regularly cleans the perimeter of an often overlooked lot sandwiched between two bustling bus stops. This lot is the Flatbush African Burial Ground (FABG). It’s marked by a small plaque, but is otherwise just an empty patch of overgrown grass.
In October 2020, the principal of the Erasmus School — where Bernardine works — asked her to participate in a community meeting organized by the city. The meeting was held by then-mayor Bill de Blasio and then-council member for the 40th District Matthieu Eugene. The politicians had asked for “various stakeholders within the community” to attend so that they could present their plan for the corner of Bedford and Church. In the throes of the pandemic, the city organized a Zoom meeting. As Bernardine recalls, it was a time defined by “ not knowing whether or not we can buy food, not knowing whether or not our families were okay.” Bernardine told me that she was the support system for some of her students and their parents, who were dealing with emotional difficulties at the time.
At the meeting, the elected officials presented their idea for Bedford and Church: a supportive housing complex. In New York City, supportive housing is defined as “affordable housing with supportive social services in place for individuals and families who are homeless or at risk of homelessness.” The city is indeed facing an affordable housing crisis, and buildings like these could help — but Bernardine couldn’t help but wonder: why here?
As the meeting went on, the invited “stakeholders” were asked for their input. It was then that attendees from the New York Historical Society chimed in, as Bernardine remembers, to mention that the site was an unmarked burial ground for enslaved and free Black people. She was shocked. Despite growing up nearby her whole life and teaching at the school right next to the lot, she had never known about its true history.
In fact, Bernardine learned there is extensive archival documentation — in newspapers, government reports, and maps — of this cemetery’s location going back centuries. In response, she and a group of other locals created the Flatbush African Burial Ground Coalition (FABG-C). Today, Bernardine is its president.
The Task Force vs. The Coalition
In Bernardine’s view, the city’s timing was “sneaky”; she feels that officials might have chosen to unveil this plan in the throes of the pandemic partly because it was a known burial ground, and those in charge didn’t want to face any blowback. But at the same time, the Black Lives Matter movement was stirring discussions about race across the nation, and Flatbush was no exception.
The FABG-C dedicated the following year to spreading awareness about the burial ground and pushing back against the housing plan in local government meetings. Bernardine, along with other co-founders and leaders of the FABG-C — Shantell Jones, Shanna Sabio, and Allyson Martinez — organized marches in Flatbush, protests at the Brooklyn Borough Hall, and more.
Initially, the FABG-C felt that their elected officials were behind them. District 40’s Council Member at that time, Mathieu Eugene, was the first Haitian-born member of City Council. District 40, which contains the Flatbush area, is 49% Black, compared to 21% citywide. Flatbush is considered New York City’s Little Caribbean. As Bernardine puts it, “ If you wanted to be connected to one of the islands in the Caribbean, Flatbush was where you were.”
When the FABG-C first started organizing against the city’s housing plan, Eugene seemed to be on their side. After he and Mayor de Blasio first announced the plan to build supportive housing, he co-chaired the Flatbush African Burial Ground Remembrance and Redevelopment Task Force with then-Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams. The task force held several meetings throughout 2021 to gather community feedback on how the land should be used.
That’s why Bernardine and the FABG-C were frustrated and confused when, seemingly all of a sudden, Council Member Eugene began to question the FABG-C toward the end of his term in 2021. As Bernardine recalls: “ We actually had hosted a meeting with him and the community to explain his part, and he basically was saying, ‘How do we know that it’s a burial ground?’”
Despite Eugene’s doubts and various other roadblocks, by the end of 2021, the FABG-C had successfully blocked the city’s construction plans to build supportive housing on the lot. Following that, the funding for the plan and the jurisdiction of the lot was transferred to the New York City Parks Department — against the FABG-C’s wishes. “ To be very honest and transparent, we were not part of the conversation of the funding going to Parks,” Bernardine said. She also said that they had been excluded from the plan to develop the site into a park until the FABG-C essentially forced their way in. “We had to kind of inject ourselves into the conversation.”
Since 2022, the FABG-C has felt that trying to be involved in the burial ground’s future has been like pulling teeth. Like with the former council member, they have struggled to create regular dialogue with the office of Rita Joseph, the District 40’s current Council Member, despite having her support early on. Before she became their Council Member, Joseph even attended demonstrations to preserve the plot. Per Prism’s reporting in summer 2021, the FABG-C seemed to have a working relationship with Joseph and the architects slated to design the park.
Now, a few years later, it’s “been silent,” according to Bernardine. Feet in 2 Worlds reached out to Joseph’s office for comment on the memorial’s status but never heard back.
In a similar vein, the FABG-C’s dialogue with the Parks Department has dwindled in the years since the department took over stewardship of the burial ground. Although the Parks Department has communicated with the FABG-C and the community here and there, organizers say it hasn’t been enough. The Parks Department’s Project Tracker for the FABG webpage notes that this site is 5% complete, with a target completion date of the lot’s design for December 2025 (originally, it was slated to be done by October 2024).
The last time the Parks Department publicly communicated to the community about the burial ground was March 2025, when it presented the proposed final design for the burial ground’s memorial in a community board meeting. The design plan from back then was to expand the park, add Palaver trees (which the presentation deck claims is a “neutral gathering spot for community discussions” in “African traditions”), and build a memorial that would nod to enslaved people’s West African heritage and symbolize “struggle and resilience.”
During the March 2025 community board meeting, Brooklyn Level Up co-founder and FABG-C co-trustee Allyson Martinez stated to the Parks project manager: “I just wanted to have a commitment from Parks that…we’re clear that there would have to be a governing or a partnering body with the community.” Martinez stressed the importance of the community’s continued engagement throughout the design and construction process. The City Council and Parks both floundered to respond. “We’ll have to figure that out,” the project manager said.
Per Bernardine, that commitment was never made. In fact, according to one source, the Parks Department has already awarded a contract for the construction of a memorial at the Flatbush African Burial Ground. If this is indeed the case, Parks did so without consulting the community or the FABG-C at all.
The FABG-C wants people who actually live in Flatbush and its surrounding areas — historically Black neighborhoods with a large Caribbean immigrant community — to decide how best to steward the site. Yet the city has gradually pushed community members out of the decision-making process, despite their offers to contribute.
Revealing What’s Underground
In 2024, the FABG-C decided to take matters into their own hands. Working with Dr. Kelly Britt at Brooklyn College, the FABG-C applied for a grant that allowed them to conduct a ground-penetrating radar survey, or GPR, of the burial ground. Dr. Britt and the FABG-C decided on this route because after months of frustrating communication (or rather, a lack thereof) with the city, it was the first step in gathering data for their own plans.
“ Most of the city’s engagement is having one or two meetings that the majority of the community doesn’t know about,” Dr. Britt said. “They talk a little bit, get some information from the community, but pretty much already have an idea of what they’re gonna do. That’s not community engagement — in my book, anyway.”
GPR is a non-intrusive way to identify underground anomalies using high frequency radio waves. Dr. Britt called it a sort of “x-ray” of the ground. The FABG-C wasn’t necessarily expecting to find remains, but hoped that the GPR would produce more evidence of burials in the lot.
The GPR was conducted by Dr. Tim Horsley, a geophysical archaeologist at Northern Illinois University and founder of Horsley Archaeological Prospection, LLC, in the fall of 2024. It was almost an entire year later, in August 2025, when Dr. Horsley was ready to announce the results of his analysis to the FABG-C. The Zoom call was attended by about eleven people, including Dr. Britt, Bernardine, and of course, Dr. Horsley.
Dr. Horsley took the time to explain his methodology in meticulous detail but ultimately, he concluded that he could not find evidence that showed definitive signs of a burial in the area that he surveyed. However, Dr. Horsley was adamant that his analysis was not the final word. “The absence of evidence,” he said, “is not evidence of absence.”
The GPR did not cover the entire area of the burial ground as outlined by a map from the time, and more significantly, there are mountains of archival and physical evidence that definitely prove that the area was indeed an African burial ground. Although Bernardine and the FABG-C were hoping for more from the GPR results, they were thankful that it allowed them to collect their own information, rather than relying on the opaque information silos of local government.
The FABG-C will certainly continue facing roadblocks in their fight to maintain stewardship of this lot. But, for them and the community of Flatbush, protecting the history of this burial ground is more necessary than ever. While it’s important for them to honor those who were laid to rest here, at a time when the federal government constantly threatens to undermine and even erase Black history, they also believe that this physical reminder of the United States’ sordid past of slavery must be represented in full.
The FABG-C often hosts walking tours around the Flatbush African Burial Ground. I followed along on one of the tours, led by Shanna Sabio, GrowHouseNYC Co-Founder-Director and FABG-C Co-Trustee. Everyone on the tour looked about high-school age. They were shy, but Sabio did her best to break the ice. The tour started on Bedford Avenue, on the sidewalk next to the site. The fence separated the tour from the grounds itself, but Sabio encouraged the teenagers to take a long, hard look inside.
As she got started, Sabio listed the names of some of the people who were enslaved in Flatbush, one by one. One was Eve — she was buried at the Flatbush African Burial Ground in 1810. Eve was enslaved by Lawrence Voorhees, a Dutch settler. Her obituary said that, even in her old age, she loved tending to her garden every summer. Though these scant facts keep us from painting a full picture of who Eve was, we can imagine she might have grown herbs, medicinal plants, or flowers. Since her funeral was well-attended “by a great concourse of the people of colour,” we can guess that her legacy in the greater community was as abundant as her garden plot. Perhaps even more.
Credits
Hosted by Quincy Surasmith
Produced by Leina Gabra
Edited by Quincy Surasmith and Mia Warren
Sound design and scoring by Ahmed Ashour
Fact checking by Julie Schwietert Collazo
Engineering by Jocelyn Gonzales
Original theme music by Gautam Srikishan
Feet in 2 Worlds is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Ford Foundation, the Fernandez Pave the Way Foundation, an anonymous donor, and contributors to our annual NewsMatch campaign.
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