Surveying An Exposed History of Black Lives

Howard Team Searches Forlorn Burial Ground

Howard students Miesha Hegwood, front, and Kristin Baker examine a leg bone that fell out of a coffin broken open by the roots of a tree at the old black cemetery at Pierce Community Park. (By Robert A. Reeder -- The Washington Post)

The professor and students descend into the filtered light of Walter C. Pierce Community Park. But for an occasional bus rumbling along Calvert Street above on a Sunday morning, there is a tranquility, even a timelessness, to much of the Northwest park that abuts the National Zoo. For biological anthropologist Mark E. Mack and his team of Howard University students, the journey into the park is personal as well as professional.

They are conducting a noninvasive archaeological survey that reaches back more than 200 years to a time when the land was the busiest local African American cemetery. The survey, they say, a way to remember the area's post-Civil War African American community and restore its marginalized history to importance.

"It's moral justice," said anthropology student Oshun Layne, 21, as she painstakingly raked the ground for burial evidence. "If your grandfather was down here, you would want someone to acknowledge that he existed, that this was where he rested."

From 1870 to 1890, more than 7,000 people were buried at the park and adjoining land, then the Colored Union Benevolent Association's cemetery, said neighborhood activist Mary Belcher. Those interred came from families affiliated with the churchgoers' association, whose members probably included community advocates from financially stable backgrounds: waiters, government messengers, drivers and laborers, Belcher and Mack say.

That history had been practically lost until summer 2005, when the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation, which oversees the park, planned a soil erosion project to shore up a wall. While city contractors were digging pits during preliminary work, Belcher and fellow history aficionado Eddie Becker saw artifacts amid the excavated dirt, making them concerned the city project could disturb remains, Becker said.

It was not the only time the land's history had surfaced.

Cleanup volunteers at the park have repeatedly found human bones there, said Stephen W. Coleman, executive director of Washington Parks & People. He called the lack of preservation and upkeep at historic parks a "national disgrace."

After months of negotiations with community members, the parks department agreed to postpone and modify its plans, pending a survey led by Mack, who had served as laboratory director for the groundbreaking New York African Burial Ground Project. That project emerged in 1991 with the discovery of an 18th century African American cemetery, which had been used by enslaved and free blacks, during construction of a federal building in New York. More than 400 skeletal remains were unearthed within a year, and the site near City Hall ultimately was designated a National Historic Landmark.

Belcher said she was shocked when her own archival research uncovered the scale of the cemetery at Pierce Community Park, which was originally used by Native Americans. The land also was home to the city's first Quaker burial ground, founded in 1807, and the Cliffburne Hospital Barracks, a Civil War facility that served more than 400 patients at its peak, she said.

For Mack, the Howard professor who is conducting the survey free of charge, the work offers a chance to "take anthropology out of the ivory tower [and] into the streets."

"This is why I got into anthropology, to learn about my history, to learn about our collective history as an American people and to do something for the benefit of the people who came before me," said Mack, who studied anthropology at Howard as an undergraduate.

Starting in late summer, Mack and his students, most of whom are seniors, used electronic surveying equipment to grid the park, driving stakes every 10 meters as reference points for mapping finds. Now they spend several mornings each week inspecting every inch of ground to locate and document grave sites, artifacts and exposed human remains.