The Harambee Coalition, African Burial Ground, & the History of Africans in The Hudson Valley

Upon obtaining an internship with the Harambee coalition at the Pine Street African Burial Ground in Kingston, I held an extremely optimistic view of the work I would be doing throughout the semester. I had been greatly excited because the movement in Kingston to restore and preserve the lost burial site is often a topic of interest on campus here at Suny New Paltz. Many professors and fellow students shared their enthusiasm for my internship. Thus, I felt pressure to both represent our university respectably, and make a significant contribution to the struggle which so many local residents in Kingston were pushing for. Although, I still hold that same enthusiasm for my work as an intern, I did come face to face with some of the difficulties both historians and public historians encounter quite regularly. Initially, I had believe that I would be able to unveil who exactly was buried in the Pine Street Burial Grounds over 150 years ago. After receiving advise from a number of professors here at Suny New Paltz and spending hours doing research, I awakened to the extreme difficulty of this task. Ultimately, what I found was that the archives are not what they used to be, or moreover the contemporary archives uploaded online are far easier to work with than the original materials.

After briefly discussing my goal to identify individuals who were buried in the Pine Street Burial Ground with both Reynolds Childress-Scott and Joseph Diamond, professors here at Suny New Paltz, I became aware of the extreme difficulty of the endeavor I had set out to achieve . Professor Joseph Diamonds comprehensive study on the Pine Street Burial Grounds, “Owned in Life, Owned in Death” became an essential tool to my approach to developing a concise narrative of the history and community activism in regards to the site.  In meeting with Professor Diamond, he suggested to me that I reach out to the African American community of  Kingston and find individuals who believe that their ancestors may have been buried in the Pine Street Burial Ground. This may have been a great place to start looking had other members of the Harambee Coalition not already attempted to reach out to the Kingston Community in order to do so, but to no avail. I spent hour in Kingston public Library rummaging the eldest microfilms containing The Kingston Daily Freeman Newspapers articles from the 19^th century and found no mention of African persons, not even an obituary. When meeting with Professor Scott-Childress he had directly stated that challenges like the lack of historical documentation and reliable sources would cause a number of set-backs toward my efforts to unveil who had been buried in at the site.

Eventually, Professor Scott-Childress did however, directed me toward the New York Heritage Historical Website. Surprisingly, one of the most fascinating insights that I had during my internship is not necessarily related to the Pine Street Burial Ground at all although it very well could be. On the NYHH website I discovered two enslaved black men who had been publicly punished for their crimes within the city of Kingston. Thom, owned by Peiter Crispell was hung, taken down and cut very gruesomely, then restrung up to make an example to other rebellious slaves in the area. Peiter Crispell, shares the same last name as the name of the middle School I went to called Crispell, in the town of Pine Bush, the former name of one of the dorm buildings here on campus, and a previously prominent slave owning family here in the Hudson Valley. Another man named James had been whipped in several different locations around the city for stealing sweet to also exemplify the punishment to other potentially defiant enslaved peoples. These two men could potentially be buried at the site but it is unfortunate however that we cannot know. Ultimately, The NYHH database and the book “In Defiance Runaways from slavery in New York’s Hudson River valley” authored by two of our very own locals , former professor here at Suny New Paltz Susan Stessin-Cohn, and former manager of archives at Historic Huguenot Street Ashley Hurlburt-Biagini, were essential in constructing my vision of the black population in size and agency.

Digitized historical documents is not anyone’s outside the field of history’s ideal tool for a historian, not student, nor your average citizen, however they are extremely simple to traverse and in the long run can save a writer or researcher ample amount of time to record their own ideas. At first, I did not envision the amount of time I would dedicated this semester researching online rather than hands on in the Kingston Public Library, however the world wide web was an essential tool to my success.