Frederick Douglass Memorial Park On Staten Island Designated As A Historic Landmark

Frederick Douglass Memorial Park Entrance

(Photo courtesy NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission)

According to the New York Amsterdam News, The New York City Landmark Preservation Commission (LPC) has officially designated Frederick Douglass Memorial Park on Staten Island as a historic landmark, due to housing one of the city’s only existing cemeteries built by and for Black New Yorkers.

“This recognition is long overdue and will solidify Frederick Douglass Memorial Park’s place in our city’s history,” said Councilmember Kamillah Hanks in a statement. “Landmark status will provide the necessary support and resources to maintain and enhance the park, allowing it to continue serving as a place of reflection, remembrance, and celebration of African American heritage. By (having it achieve) landmark status, we ensure that future generations recognize and honor the contributions of African Americans to our city’s rich history”

The memorial park, founded in 1933 by a Harlem funeral director named Rodney Dade, encompasses nearly 15 acres along Amboy Road in Oakwood Heights, Staten Island. Dade recognized the need to provide a sacred burial site for Black people in the city at a time when racism and racial segregation were rampant.

Shown is the Frederick Douglass Memorial Park in Oakwood on Friday, April 12, 2024. (Staten Island Advance/Jan Somma-Hammel)Jan Somma-Hammel

At white cemeteries during the time, Black families’ deceased were buried in the “least desirable” land plots, separated from others, and their visitors were made to use side entrances, according to the LPC. Dade teamed up with businessperson Benjamin Diamond and attorney Frederick Bunn to make the park happen, commissioning architect James Wallace Higgins to design it, said the LPC. They chose Staten Island for its large swaths of undeveloped land at the time.

The park always included a memorial dedicated to abolitionist Frederick Douglass, but the Douglass monument wasn’t put up until 1961.

The park’s cemetery was built in 1935 and is still an active burial site. It provided “dignified burials” for Black citizens and their loved ones in natural landscaping that Dade intended for his community. Before this, enslaved and freed Blacks alike were often left in unmarked mass graves at the edges of the city or had their burial grounds desecrated and built upon, said historians. As of today, an estimated 60,000 interments of Black New Yorkers have been made in the park’s cemetery, including jazz singers Mamie Smith and Rosa Henderson, jazz trumpeter Tommy Ladnier, baseball players King Solomon “Sol” White and Elias “Country” Brown, and six incarcerated people who were killed in the Attica Correctional Facility uprising in 1971.

This year, the LPC voted to continue exploring the city’s history of slavery and abolition, and preserve historic places, by landmarking the park and cemetery.

“Frederick Douglass Memorial Park represents the enduring strength and resilience of New York’s Black community, who created a place of beauty in the face of injustice and overcame racism and discrimination to ensure their loved ones had a dignified resting place,” said LPC Chair Sarah Carroll. “The landmark designation of this important site reflects LPC’s ongoing commitment to recognizing, protecting, and celebrating places of Black cultural and historical significance, and ensures that Frederick Douglass Memorial Park will be preserved for future generations to come.”

State Senator Jessica Scarcella Spanton said the designation of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Park as a landmark is an important achievement for the Staten Island community. “This cemetery offered a place where Black New Yorkers could be laid to rest with the honor they deserved,” she said in a statement. “Now, decades later, the ancestors of so many of my constituents remain buried here with dignity.”

The Staten Island Museum and the Staten Island Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (SIAAHGS) currently have free digitized archives of the people buried at Frederick Douglass Memorial Park, available online.

“Being designated as [an] NYC Landmark is such a well-deserved and key status to achieve to help ensure that the Frederick Douglass Memorial Park site is well-preserved,” said Staten Island Museum President and CEO Janice Monger. “Thanks to Mayor Adams and the Landmarks Preservation Commission for the recognition of this incredible Staten Island site of broader significance.”

The program is under the park’s Access, Collaboration, and Equity in Genealogy Initiative (ACEGen), a partnership between the memorial park and SIAAHGS. The initiative is supported with funding from the New York Community Trust.