Green-Wood marks Juneteenth with tour of Black history

Juneteenth, observed on June 19, commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned they were free. Green-Wood Cemetery hosted a free two-hour tour to commemorate the day, beginning and ending at its main entrance at Fifth Avenue and 25th Street.

A trolley carrying visitors from around the world traveled through the 478-acre cemetery, stopping at the graves of people who played notable roles in New York City’s Black history.

“My main goal is to tell history with context and without leaving anything out,” Eric, the tour guide, told attendees. “Some of the stories I tell are difficult, but they are real, and they need to be told.”

According to Eric, this was the second year the tour was held on Juneteenth. Similar tours were held in February of last year and again this year to commemorate Black History Month.

Steve, originally from Wisconsin, was visiting his son, who lives in New York. He and his wife decided to take the tour. “It’s important to learn as much history as possible,” he said.

About 500,000 people visit the cemetery each year. Green-Wood is the resting place of some 600,000 people and is home to approximately 7,000 trees.

The tour’s first stop was the grave of Samuel E. Cornish, co-founder of Freedom’s Journal, the first Black newspaper in the United States. Other stops included the graves of Elizabeth Gloucester, a real estate entrepreneur and prominent abolitionist who used her considerable fortune to support the Underground Railroad and help people escaping slavery; Charles L. Reason, a mathematician and educator who became the first Black professor at a predominantly white American college; and Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward, the first Black woman to earn a medical degree in New York State and the third in the United States. McKinney Steward was also a tireless advocate for civil rights and women’s suffrage.

The tour also visited the graves of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, New York’s first Black millionaire, who built a vast fortune on Wall Street during the 19th century; and Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose revolutionary, graffiti-influenced work addressed race and challenged New York’s elite art establishment during the 1980s.

Throughout the tour, attendees asked questions about the cemetery and the history surrounding Juneteenth for New York’s Black community.

“For me, it was very interesting to understand how space was allocated unequally, even centuries ago,” Joana, a first-time tour attendee, told the Sunset Post. “The graves for Black people were smaller and located at the back of the cemetery.”

One of the final stops was the Freedom Lots, seven public burial lots where more than 1,300 African Americans were laid to rest. In 2017, Green-Wood worked with high school interns to document and restore portions of the lots, conduct archival research into the people buried there and uncover 12 sunken grave markers. Following the project, the area formerly known as the “Colored Lots” was renamed the Freedom Lots at the students’ suggestion, honoring the people whose stories they had helped recover.

“It is very important to understand the cemetery’s context in order to grasp the realities of earlier eras and their relationship to slavery,” said Angeles, a production assistant at Green-Wood. “It is all here — then and now.”