On a brisk February afternoon, the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance invited visitors to tour Van Cortlandt Park’s Enslaved African Burial Ground, drawing renewed attention to a wooded site marked only by a modest green sign. The program is part of a broader effort to retell the park’s storied history as a sprawling plantation through the lives of the enslaved Africans who sustained the land rather from the vantage point of the family that owned it.
Ashley Hart Adams, the Alliance’s arts integration strategist, said the Alliances’ Reimagining the Enslaved African Burial Ground initiative seeks to shift that frame.
“We want, for people who hear about this history, to see the enslaved people for the historical figures that they were,” she said. “The landscape of this park does not exist without that labor. [The Van Cortlandt House] doesn’t exist without that labor.”…