New York City African Burial Ground Monument Defaced With Racist Slur

Police are looking for a vandal who scribbled a racist slur on New York City’s African Burial Ground monument. 

The Lower Manhattan monument marks the spot where as many as 15,000 Africans were buried between 1690 and 1794. The grounds were used because Africans, both enslaved and freed, weren’t allowed to be buried in cemeteries. According to the New York Daily News, the slur was found on a plaque on Thursday evening and removed by workers. The paper reports that police believe the tag was left at around noon that same day. 

The New York Times writes that the graffiti read “Kill” followed by a slur. It is the second such event to make headlines in the city this week after “Kill All Jews” was found on the walls of a Brooklyn synagogue. 

The site’s status as an African burial ground was revealed in 1991 during surveys to build a federal office building there. When the former use of the site became clear, the building was redesigned to avoid building over the site where the remains had been uncovered. 

The current monument site still contains the remains of more than 419 Africans and points to a little-publicized part of the history of the city, which had the second-largest number of enslaved Africans in the nation at the time of the Revolutionary War. The site has been a National Historic Landmark since 1993, and the memorial was dedicated in 2007. It depicts the Atlantic Ocean and the continents involved in the slave trade, in stone gathered from North America and South Africa.