African Burial Ground Square in Sankofa Park

...The park's name was changed from Schenk Park to Sankofa Park; the Dutch Schenk family owned slaves and Sankofa..... There are plans to relandscape the third of the park that was historically a burial ground for African-American enslaved persons to honor their memory and celebrate story-telling traditions; it has been renamed African Burial Ground Square.

The New Lots Dutch Reformed Church (also a Clio entry) still stands on the south side of New Lots Avenue, across from the New Lots branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. The land north of the library and south of Livonia Avenue became a playground in the late nineteenth century, formerly known as Schenk Park. The land now occupied by the library and the park once was used as a burial ground for the Village of New Lots. The cemetery was used since the seventeenth century and those buried there included Revolutionary War soldiers, local farm families, and African-American slaves.

The farmers of New Lots volunteered to build a church for their village in the early 1820s, on donated land across the street from the cemetery. The little white church you see on New Lots Ave. was constructed from 1823 to 1824, with donated lumber from the local farmers' wood lots timber. Reportedly, the cemetery that you see next to (east of) the church, on the south side of New Lots Ave., was not established until 1841. At that time, a number of burials were exhumed from the old cemetery on the north side of New Lots Ave. and were moved, with their gravestones, to the new cemetery. However, not all of the burials were moved. Although the reasons aren't clear, it may have been an economic issue, with those families who could afford to move their ancestors and purchase space in the new cemetery predominating. The graves of the more well-to-do families were more likely to have inscribed gravemarkers to make identification of burial plots in the old cemetery easier. The old and new cemeteries eventually appeared to be segregated by race, with a late nineteenth-century map rediscovered in recent years reportedly labeling the old cemetery as a "Negro Burial Ground." [check wording - not what I found on map]....