Community members and faith leaders gather for a reinterment ceremony of 36 African ancestors in Charleston, S.C., on May 4, 2019. (Photo by Raquel Fleskes, Ph.D., anthropology professor at Dartmouth College)
In the course of construction work in 2013, the remains of 36 individuals of African descent were uncovered in the heart of downtown Charleston. They had lain hidden for some 200 years in an unmarked 18th-century burial ground.
For more than two centuries, such burial grounds, especially those in the former American slave states, have often been erased or obscured — paved over by parking lots, built upon by highways or private development, or simply left unknown and untended…