Antebellum British writer and traveler John Lambert witnessed the making of coffins in Charleston for the bodies of 700 Africans, who died 200+ years ago before they could be sold into slavery.
“Carpenters were daily employed at the wharf, in making shells (coffins) for the dead bodies,” Lambert wrote in 1810 in describing activity at Gadsden’s Wharf.
Lambert came to Charleston in late 1807 to observe the ending of the international slave trade. In advance of that, traders rushed to sell people from The Gambia, Congo and Angola, he wrote.
The bodies of Africans who died during the Atlantic crossing were thrown into the Cooper River to save the expense of burying them. The city stopped that practice when locals refused to buy fish caught in the river, he said.
Lambert didn’t say where the Gadsden Wharf victims were interred. But historians now speculate they were likely placed in the racially segregated “Strangers and Negroes Burying Ground,” where the College of Charleston plans to build a dormitory that could house up to 1,000 students.
The proposed dorm at 106 Coming St., the former headquarters of the YWCA of Greater Charleston, has been met with stiff opposition. Some Charlestonians believe the college initially didn’t do enough to inform the community of its plans. Community members say they don’t want the human remains at the site to be disturbed.
Biological anthropologist Michael Blakey, one of the nation’s leading experts on the handling of human remains, said the people who suspect they could be related to the people buried in the cemetery should decide the most ethical approach to treat the remains.
“Descendant communities are not just one of many stakeholders,” said Blakey, a professor of anthropology, Africana studies and American studies at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
“In this regard not all stakeholders are equal,” he said. “When it comes to determining how one’s ancestral remains will be memorialized the descendant communities should have the last word.”
Blakey said the college’s decision to purchase 106 Coming St., knowing it was once used as a burial ground, “represents an example of white institutional disregard for African American burial sites.”
College officials, however, have said they will follow the law, engage with the public and preserve the history of the potter’s field and the YWCA — if it gains approvals to build the dorm.
Blakey will speak 6 p.m. Dec. 8 at Emanuel AME Church on Calhoun Street. The event is sponsored by the Preservation Society of Charleston (PSC).
Blakey was the lead investigator in the 1990s for the analysis of remains of mostly enslaved Africans who were discovered at a federal construction site in Lower Manhattan. The site is now the African Burial Ground National Monument. It is estimated that the site holds the remains of 15,000 to 20,000 Africans and people of African descent who were buried between the 1690s and 1794.
A similar discovery was made in 2013 in Charleston when 36 people of African and Native American descent were discovered during an expansion of the Charleston Gaillard Center. Organizers are planning to commemorate that site Dec. 14 with the dedication for the Anson Street African Burial Memorial.
In May, 74 gravesites were found at 635 King St., the construction site for Courier Square, a mixed-use development on land previously owned by Evening Post Industries, the former parent company of The Post and Courier. The site was once the St. James Methodist Church, founded in the late 1700s, and a likely cemetery. The remains will soon be relocated to Bethany Cemetery, officials said, with little discussion involving descendants.
It is estimated between 4,600 and 12,000 individuals may be interred in the formerly city-owned burial ground on Coming St., according to a report prepared for the college. The deceased include poor Whites, Africans newly arrived on slave ships, travelers and orphaned children.
Goose Creek resident Vanessa Halyard said because a DNA test shows her ancestors came from the Ivory Coast, she considers herself part of the descendant community. As a former director of after-school care programs at the YWCA she also wants the Y’s legacy to not be erased, if the building is demolished.
“I firmly believe that I am a part of the descendant community because of the fact they were taken from Africa and brought here,” she said. “My ancestors come from Africa. Who knows someone buried there might have come from the same village as my descendants.”
Halyard was among the 67 people who attended a recent public hearing and meeting at the Charleston Museum that was held by the S.C. Department of Environmental Services (SCDES). The agency set Nov. 28 as the deadline for comments on the project. It then will decide whether it will give the college the permit to remove part of the asphalt parking lot for a second round of ground-penetrating radar scans. The college has said earlier scans at the YWCA parking lot were inconclusive for the presence of human remains.
But removing the asphalt could create an unintended and illegal opening of a grave, said Charleston archaeologist John Fisher, who also attended the DES meeting.
“That is not common practice in archaeology,” he told The Charleston City Paper. “We would never shave off the top before running GPR. I’ve never heard of anybody tearing up pavement to then be non-invasive because at that point you are being invasive,” he said.
The PSC and other members of a coalition that opposes the dormitory want DES to grant a 30-day extension to the Nov. 28 deadline because some documents weren’t available before the public hearing. As of Dec. 2, no extension had been given.
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