New federal legislation is set to be introduced which will help protect African American burial grounds impacted by new construction. The African American Burial Grounds Preservation Act is part of a series of measures expected to be signed into law by President Biden before the end of 2022 and is the result of five years of bipartisan efforts.

The act will create the African American Burial Grounds Preservation Program, which aims to identify burial grounds ahead of infrastructure projects and commercial development. It is hoped that the program will minimize construction delays on projects, as well as avoid “unnecessary community heartache.” The program will also assist descendants and communities in expressing their histories through grant money to identify, interpret, and preserve historic cemeteries.

“The African American Burial Grounds Preservation Program will support descendant communities and their allies in saving our history, while simultaneously informing development decisions and community planning,” said Julie Schablitsky, president of the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA). The SHA lobbied Congress for five years on the issue, having been frequently called onto construction sites to identify burial plots that had already been disturbed by development.

Supporters of the program note that the historic cemeteries are “emblematic of the unequal treatment African Americans endured in life and in death,” and that many sites have suffered from decades of neglect as well as policies that “ignored and devalued their very assistance.”

“Families of the deceased were often unable to maintain the gravesites because they were enslaved, lacked ownership of the land, or had no record of where their ancestors were buried,” said the Coalition for American Heritage, who supported the bill. “Pre-emancipation genealogical and burial records are especially difficult for African American families to obtain. Burial grounds were frequently segregated by race and unmarked. In many states, local governments have funded the maintenance of Confederate cemeteries but not African American burial grounds.”

News of the legislation comes weeks after the Biden Administration introduced the first-ever Federal Building Performance Standard, a move which was welcomed by the American Institute of Architects.