Slavery arrived in what would become New York City around 1626, when the Dutch West India Company brought Paul D'Angola, Simon Congo, Lewis Guinea, and eight other men to New Netherland. Their names recorded their places of origin: Angola, the Congo, Guinea. Under Dutch rule, some enslaved Africans could petition for "half-freedom" and own land. By the mid-seventeenth century, farms of free Black residents covered 130 acres where Washington Square Park stands today. That changed when the English seized New Amsterdam in 1664 and imposed harsher restrictions. By the time of the American Revolution, enslaved Africans constituted nearly a quarter of the city's population. New York held the second-largest enslaved population of any American city, behind only Charleston, South Carolina. In 1697, Trinity Church gained control of the city's burial grounds and passed an ordinance barring people of African descent from interment within church limits. The dead had to go somewhere, so they were carried to a shallow valley on the outskirts of the city, just north of present-day Chambers Street, beyond the stockade that marked the northern boundary of colonial New York.

Labeled on colonial maps as the "Negros Burial Ground," the 6.6-acre site was first recorded as being used around 1712, though the earliest burials may date to the late 1690s. The ground was not left in peace. Archaeologists found that Europeans had used the cemetery as a dumping ground for industrial waste and ceramics throughout the eighteenth century. In April 1788, the revelation that physicians and medical students were digging up bodies from the burial ground for dissection triggered the Doctors' Riot, one of New York's most violent public disturbances. After the city closed the cemetery in 1794, the land was graded and covered with up to twenty-five feet of landfill. The first large-scale development atop the graves was the A.T. Stewart Company Store, the country's first department store, which opened in 1846 at 280 Broadway. Workers unearthed skeletons during construction, but the discovery aroused little interest. A homeowner named James Gemmel told his daughter that digging his cellar at 290 Broadway had turned up many human bones. He assumed he had found a potter's field. The burial ground was forgotten for nearly two hundred years.

When the General Services Administration began excavating at 290 Broadway in 1991, the scope of what lay beneath the federal building site became overwhelming. Archaeologists ultimately exhumed the remains of 419 individuals, but it was clear the burial ground extended far beyond what could be excavated. In 1992, activists staged a protest at the site, galvanized by reports that some intact burials had been broken apart during construction. Located between City Hall and the federal courts, the site carried powerful symbolic weight. Congress intervened, passing legislation in October 1992 that ordered the GSA to cease construction on the pavilion portion of the building, allocate three million dollars for preservation, and create space for a memorial. Howard University was commissioned to study the remains, guided by four questions the African-American community wanted answered: the cultural origins of those buried there, the transformation from African to African-American identity, the quality of life under enslavement, and the ways the enslaved had resisted their bondage.

On October 4, 2003, the 419 studied remains were reinterred in the Ancestral Reinterment Grove in a ceremony called the "Rites of Ancestral Return." Each set of remains was placed in a hand-carved wooden coffin made in Ghana and lined with Kente cloth. The coffins were sealed inside seven sarcophagi and buried in seven mounds with the heads facing west. The memorial that followed, designed by architect Rodney Leon and dedicated on October 5, 2007, consists of two elements: the Ancestral Chamber, built from Verde Fontaine green granite quarried in Africa, and the Circle of the Diaspora, which features a map of the Atlantic referencing the Middle Passage. The Ancestral Chamber's height represents the depth at which the graves were found, and a heart-shaped Sankofa symbol engraved on its surface carries the West African meaning: "Learn from the past to prepare for the future." President George W. Bush designated the site as the 123rd National Monument on February 27, 2006. Maya Angelou spoke at the dedication ceremony.

The African Burial Ground forced New York to look at a history it had systematically erased. As archaeologist Theresa Singleton of the Smithsonian Institution observed, the discovery created a national audience for African-American archaeology and shattered the assumption among even some Black scholars that such research was a waste of time. The New-York Historical Society mounted its first exhibit on slavery in New York in 2005; the planned six-month run was extended into 2007 because of overwhelming demand. A visitor center opened inside the Ted Weiss Federal Building on February 27, 2010, featuring a permanent exhibit called "Reclaiming Our History" with a life-sized tableau depicting a dual funeral for an adult and child. The city renamed Elk Street as African Burial Ground Way. The National Park Service now manages the site as its 390th unit, arranging exhibitions and cultural events. What lies beneath the monument is a reminder that New York City was built not just by immigrants arriving at Ellis Island but by enslaved Africans who lived, worked, and died here for two hundred years, and whose resting place was paved over until the earth itself refused to stay silent.