NEW YORK, NY.- In June 1991, Christopher Moore’s mother phoned him from North Carolina with bad news: An ancient family cemetery was being excavated in lower Manhattan by the federal government for an office building. The cemetery had been started long ago by Moore’s Native American ancestors and later became known as the Negroes Burying Ground.

“Will you find out for me if we have people in this burial ground?” his mother asked him, as Moore, whose mother was Native American and father was Black, recalled in an essay in The New York Times in 2007.

By training a journalist (he had worked in radio news), by avocation a historian and by nature a man of limitless curiosity, Moore promptly visited the site.

“When I was a child, my mother would tell me: ‘Read if you want to learn a subject. But listen if you really want to master it,’” Moore wrote. “Listening was the old Indian way to find solutions to problems.”

Information was hard to come by because workers at the site were required to sign confidentiality agreements, he said, but some admitted that truckloads of human bone fragments, buried before the cemetery was closed in 1794, were being carted away even as archaeologists excavated the site to determine its historical significance. Then, he said, he was devastated to learn that the federal government had decided to abandon the archaeological dig and proceed with construction.

“But then the skeletal remains of a woman were found, and within days 10 more skeletons were exposed,” he recalled. “Outraged that no one seemed to be paying attention to this extraordinary historical moment, I called every journalist I knew — and my mother, of course.”

After Mayor David Dinkins and other elected officials intervened, the office building was redesigned to accommodate the burial ground. The site was memorialized by five public artworks and designated a New York City landmark and a National Historic Monument.

The outcome was also a testament to Moore’s passion for preserving the past, which he would pursue throughout his varied career as a curator, archivist, author, storyteller, researcher and the longest-serving member of New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, from 1995 to 2015.

He was 70 when he died March 13 in a Brooklyn hospital. His wife, Kim Yancey-Moore, said the cause was complications of COVID-19 and pneumonia.

“I consider Christopher Moore in many ways the Alex Haley of the African American presence in New York City,” John T. Reddick, an architectural and cultural historian, said by email, referring to the author of the saga “Roots,” “in that he was able to trace and document his family’s presence in New York back to the Dutch, which brought to his discussions of the African presence in the city a personal lens.”




Christopher Paul Moore was born Jan. 20, 1952, in Suffern, New York, to Willard and Norma (DeFreese) Moore. His mother was an artist who was descended from the Ramapough Lenape Council of Native Americans; his father was a farmer.

After graduating from Northeastern University in Boston in 1974 with a bachelor of fine arts degree in theater and journalism, Moore became a news editor for the National Black Network, comprising more than 100 Black-oriented radio stations. As an actor he appeared in the television soap opera “As the World Turns” and an off-Broadway production of “A Soldier’s Play.”

He married Kim Yancey, an actor, in 1990. In addition to her, he is survived by their two sons, Terrence and Matthew, and his sister, Nancy Lipscomb.

Moore became research coordinator for the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, where he was “a beacon of knowledge,” said its director, Joy L. Bivins.

Moore helped curate a number of Schomburg exhibitions, including “Lest We Forget: The Triumph Over Slavery” (2001); “Africana Age: African and African Diasporan Transformations in the 20th Century” (2002); “The Ralph Bunche Centennial” (2003); and “The Buffalo Soldiers: The African American Soldier in the U.S. Army” (2004). He was a contributor to “The Black New Yorkers: The Schomburg Illustrated Chronology” (2000), by Howard Dodson.

Moore was also the author of “Standing in the Need of Prayer: A Celebration of Black Prayer” (2003) and “Fighting for America: Black Soldiers, the Unsung Heroes of World War II” (2005).

His “Santa and Pete: A Novel of Christmas Present and Past” (1998), a book he wrote with Pamela Johnson about Afro-Dutch Christmas traditions in New Amsterdam, was adapted for a CBS TV movie, “Santa and Pete,” in 1999, starring James Earl Jones and Hume Cronyn.

Moore wrote and produced the History Channel’s “The African Burial Ground: An American Discovery” (1994), starring Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, about the lower Manhattan site, and wrote a history of the burial ground for the National Park Service.

As a member of the Landmarks Preservation Commission for two decades, he was instrumental in preserving a variety of properties and, even before he was appointed, wrote the reports designating several landmarks, including the Mother AME Zion Church and the Abyssinian Baptist Church, both in Harlem.

Sarah Carroll, chair of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, said Moore’s “expertise in Native American, African American and New York City history informed and inspired the commission’s work.” And Jennifer Raab, a former commission chair who is now president of Hunter College in New York, cited Moore’s “special ability to make cultural history come alive.”

“Under his quiet but brilliant leadership,” she said, “the commission made strides in protecting and celebrating African American history.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.