The burials told stories that no written record could. Among the grave goods were British coins, one placed deliberately inside the eye socket of a skull, a practice with roots in West African funerary traditions where coins guided the spirit on its journey. Researchers found the remains of a wooden coffin and buttons from what appeared to be a boy's coat. DNA analysis and isotope mapping of teeth and bones revealed that six of the thirty-six individuals had been born in Africa itself, carried across the Atlantic in the holds of slave ships. The remaining twenty-nine were Black people born in the South Carolina Lowcountry, the first or second generation of a displaced people. These were not abstractions. These were individuals with birthplaces, ages, and ancestries that science was now, slowly, beginning to recover.

Charleston was the single largest port of entry for enslaved Africans in North America. An estimated 40 percent of all enslaved people brought to the American colonies and later the United States passed through its harbor. The Anson Street burial ground existed during the height of this trade, a three-decade window when Charleston's economy depended entirely on forced labor in rice and indigo fields. That the burial ground was forgotten is not surprising. Colonial-era burial sites for enslaved people were rarely marked on maps, rarely maintained, and frequently built over as the city expanded. The Gaillard Center site, at the corner of George and Anson Streets, had been developed and redeveloped multiple times before 2013, each layer of construction pushing the graves further from public awareness.

The path from excavation to reinterment took six years and required something no city ordinance could mandate: community trust. Dr. Ade Ofunniyin of the Gullah Society worked with Mayor John Tecklenburg's office and descendant communities to design a process that honored both African spiritual traditions and the specific history of the Lowcountry. On April 27, 2019, at McLeod Plantation Historic Site, a traditional Yoruba naming ceremony gave each of the thirty-six individuals a name. One week later, on May 4, 2019, a reinterment ceremony returned the remains to the Anson Street site where they had originally been laid to rest. The community had decided: these ancestors would stay where their people had placed them more than two hundred years before.

A memorial fountain now marks the site, designed by North Carolina artist Stephen L. Hayes Jr. Its basin is formed in part from earth taken from African-descendant burial sites across Charleston. Surrounding the basin stand thirty-six pairs of bronze hands, each pair cast from the hands of a living volunteer who shares the same approximate age, gender, and ancestry as one of the buried individuals. The memorial transforms scientific data into something tactile and human. It stands steps from the Gaillard Center's grand entrance, a deliberate juxtaposition: a performing arts venue built atop ground that was, for thirty years in the eighteenth century, a place where enslaved people were mourned and remembered by those who loved them.