Credit: Queens Borough President’s Office
New York wants to ensure a historic burial ground of formerly enslaved people in Queens finally receives the protection and recognition it deserves. Attorney General Letitia James on Friday filed a motion to intervene in a pending foreclosure action involving 47-11 90th Street in Elmhurst, a site where nearly 300 freed African slaves were buried in the early 19th century, seeking a court order requiring any prospective buyer to be notified of the human remains on the property and their legal obligations to protect them. Dating back to 1818, the site was rediscovered in 2006 and has since been paved over and disturbed during subsequent development. Now that the property is once again up for sale, the state is seeking to ensure the burial ground is respected by its next owner.
After slavery was abolished in New York in 1827, communities of freed Black New Yorkers began to grow throughout the state. One of them was Newtown, located in present-day Elmhurst. A group of formerly enslaved people formed the United African Society of Newtown, constructing a church and an adjacent burial ground that had already been used informally for the previous decade.
The site is believed to have been established in 1818, nine years before the abolition of slavery, and at one point contained the remains of more than 300 New Yorkers, many of them formerly enslaved people…