by Michelle Mullen

Under a thick canopy of trees at Van Cortlandt Park, the steady beat of African drums drifted through the Enslaved African Burial Ground, opening the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance and the Bronx Arts Ensemble’s sixth annual Juneteenth Celebration.

There, an intimate libation ceremony honored those once enslaved on the land that is now Van Cortlandt Park. This year, the burial ground ceremony opened the event rather than closing it, a change organizers said was meant to set a more solemn tone before the celebration began.

Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, the day when the last enslaved people were freed from a Texas plantation, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.

Van Cortlandt Park itself is a site with a storied past. Jacobus Van Cortlandt, a two-time mayor of New York City, built his wealth partly through the transatlantic slave trade and ran the estate as a plantation.

Until 1821, enslaved people were the foundation of daily life there, laboring in the fields and hauling timber and stone to build the Van Cortlandt house itself, now a museum. In 2019, it was discovered slaves were buried on the grounds on an unmarked patch of land. In 2021, the site was formally renamed the Enslaved African Burial Ground.

Holding the ceremony steps away from “the ancestors” was deeply intentional, Judith Insell, executive director of the Bronx Arts Ensemble said.

“We need to honor and respect them and celebrate them more than anything,” Insell said. “To actually properly acknowledge that it’s here, we should take the time and pursue something like a libation ceremony to properly name that it is sacred land.”

Yolanda Wyns, who led and curated the entirety of the Juneteenth program, reshaped the evening around movement and music, replacing the walk between venues with a New Orleans-style brass band procession.

“I wanted the people to feel connected, no matter what color, just connected to the history of it and the emotion of it,” Wyns said.

The celebration also unveiled design concepts for the Reimagining the Enslaved African Burial Ground in Van Cortlandt Park initiative, a community-involved project aiming to properly memorialize the site.

As the sun set, the drumming, the songs and the quiet moments of reflection all pointed back to a patch of ground where people once lived, labored and were later buried, their stories still emerging centuries later.

Keywords

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Van Cortlandt Park,

Enslaved African Burial Ground,

Bronx Juneteenth,

Van Cortlandt Park Alliance,

Bronx Arts Ensemble,

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African burial ground,

enslaved Africans,

Bronx history,

New York City slavery history,