Today's Date: March 28, 2024
Carnegie Learning Named 2024 SIIA CODiE Award Finalist for Best Educational Game and Best AI Implementation in Ed Tech   •   Amerex Group Unveils Red Carter Swimwear's Revitalized Collection   •   Torrid Reports Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2023 Results and Initiates Fiscal 2024 Guidance   •   John Legend to Perform at City Year Los Angeles’ 13th Annual Spring Break Event   •   Make-A-Wish and celebrity wish granters announce goal to recruit 1 million people to become "WishMakers"   •   Taro Pharmaceuticals U.S.A., Inc. Expands OTC Portfolio for Children with the Introduction of bébé Bottoms™   •   Coachella Concerned That People Have Sex, Says AHF   •   PMI Foods Gives Easter Donation of 15,000 Pounds of Prime Rib to New Life Church in Arkansas   •   Visit Visalia Recognizes Autism Awareness Month in April   •   More $10-a-day child care spaces   •   Re:wild and Colossal Biosciences team up to leverage revolutionary technology to save critically endangered species on the brink   •   Fastenal Releases 2024 Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Report   •   Empire State Realty Trust Receives WELL Health-Safety Leadership Award; Becomes Among the First Commercial Office and Multifamil   •   Suffolk Kicks off 2024 “Build With Us @ Suffolk” Program in Boston for Trade Partners, Opening Doors for Minority-,   •   YMCA of the USA Partners With Old Spice To Increase High School Graduation Among Boys And Young Men Of Color Through Mentorship   •   VIRGIN HOTELS CHAMPIONS INCLUSIVE TRAVEL FOR NEURODIVERSE TRAVELERS   •   Sypher Secures Strategic Partnership with FAIA to Fuel Growth   •   Equalpride Partners with TransLash Media for Trans Day of Visibility, Amplifying Voices of Black Trans Femmes in the Arts   •   Jamieson Wellness Publishes Inaugural Sustainability Impact Report   •   Parkland Corporation Announces the Results of the 2024 Annual General Meeting of Shareholders
Bookmark and Share

What It Took To Preserve A Black Legacy In NY

 ALBANY, GA - On Thursday, February 24, the Albany Civil Rights Institute (ACRI) will hold its second Monthly Community Night in 2011 with architectural designer Peggy King Jorde speaking on "The African Burial Ground: What It Took to Preserve an African American Legacy in New York City." King Jorde was a key player in the fight to preserve the remains of over 400 eighteenth-century Africans and African Americans buried in Lower Manhattan. The skeletal remains were discovered when construction began on a new federal building in New York in 1991.  After much controversy, the building was completed and the site became a National Monument with a memorial that commemorates the lives and burials of colonial Africans and African Americans, in what one historian has called "the oldest known African cemetery in urban America."  The African Burial Ground has been called "the single-most important, historic urban archaeological project undertaken in the United States."

 

BLACK NEWS, AFRICAN AMERICAN NEWS, MINORITY NEWS, CIVIL RIGHTS NEWS, DISCRIMINATION, RACISM, RACIAL EQUALITY, BIAS, EQUALITY, AFRO AMERICAN NEWSPeggy King Jorde has spent two decades in the public and private sectors in architectural design, cultural resource management and development, construction, project management, public art, and community relations.  A native of Albany, she grew up in a family noted for their professionalism and public service.  Her grandfather, businessman C.W. King, attended the Tuskegee Institute and worked there as Booker T. Washington's student carriage driver.  Her father was the celebrated C.B. King, the only black attorney practicing in southwest Georgia at the time of the Albany Movement. Her mother was the director of the Head Start program for Albany preschoolers.  Reflecting on her childhood in Albany, King Jorde noted, "I grew up in a family where the parents' professional lives were geared towards really meaningful things."

Peggy King Jorde has carried on that tradition.  She went to Columbia where she studied architecture and served as a planner in New York Mayor David Dinkins's office of construction.  It was there in 1991 that she first heard of the African burial ground.  She sent memo after memo to city administrators telling them of the archaeological site's importance for African American history.  As the press began to cover this project and the likelihood that "archaeological resources stood to be compromised," she was officially assigned to the project. For the next several years, King Jorde worked to insure that the remains were preserved, and after archaeological study at Howard University, reinterred at the site.  Eventually a memorial was established and today visitors can view this stunning outdoor site any time of the year.

The discovery and preservation of the African Burial Ground is part of an interesting rediscovery of New York's slave past.  According to ACRI director Lee W. Formwalt, "We don't often think of northern colonies, especially, New York, as slave societies and yet they were.  New York City was one of the worst with over 20 percent of its 18th-century population consisting of enslaved Africans and their children."  The African Burial Ground which contains the remains of between 10,000 and 20,000 people is a very tangible link to that past, and a reminder, according to Formwalt, that slavery and race were, and are, not just southern problems, and their consequences are something we still face as a nation today.


STORY TAGS: BLACK NEWS, AFRICAN AMERICAN NEWS, MINORITY NEWS, CIVIL RIGHTS NEWS, DISCRIMINATION, RACISM, RACIAL EQUALITY, BIAS, EQUALITY, AFRO AMERICAN NEWS



Back to top
| Back to home page
Video

White House Live Stream
LIVE VIDEO EVERY SATURDAY
alsharpton Rev. Al Sharpton
9 to 11 am EST
jjackson Rev. Jesse Jackson
10 to noon CST


Video

LIVE BROADCASTS
Sounds Make the News ®
WAOK-Urban
Atlanta - WAOK-Urban
KPFA-Progressive
Berkley / San Francisco - KPFA-Progressive
WVON-Urban
Chicago - WVON-Urban
KJLH - Urban
Los Angeles - KJLH - Urban
WKDM-Mandarin Chinese
New York - WKDM-Mandarin Chinese
WADO-Spanish
New York - WADO-Spanish
WBAI - Progressive
New York - WBAI - Progressive
WOL-Urban
Washington - WOL-Urban

Listen to United Natiosns News