A Burial Ground and Its Dead Are Given Life

clipped from www.nytimes.com Museum Review | African Burial Ground Visitor Center A Burial Ground and Its Dead Are Given Life Jessica Ebelhar for The New York Times The African Burial National Monument in Lower Manhattan includes a memorial sculpted by Rodney Leon. By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN Cemeteries are at least as much for the living as the dead. They are the locus of tribute and memory; they affirm connections to a place and its past. That is a reason why Saturday’s opening of the African Burial Ground Visitor Center, near where these remains were reinterred, is so important. Among the scars left by the heritage of slavery, one of the greatest is an absence: where are the memorials, cemeteries, architectural structures or sturdy sanctuaries that typically provide the ground for a people’s memory? Enlarge This Image Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times The centerpiece of the new visitor center exhibits is a life-size tableau of a burial ceremony.