During the meeting at Mount Moriah Baptist Church, Johns cited opposition raised at a Dec. 15 meeting there.
"We always intended to honor the Potter's Field by both ceremony and some kind of monument," said Johns, but "we heard the voices of the community."
He noted comments by a young woman who he said told him, "We believe that in 1955, when the high-rise was originally put on this site, that the ancestors were disrespected. And although your plan is to put houses where the current high rise is, and there are no remains left there, it still does not address the disrespect that was done to our ancestors back in 1955."
Johns said the woman's remarks prompted officials to reconsider.
"That hit all of us, and when we came back we had to look at things differently," Johns said. "We thought we were doing the right thing by creating affordable housing on what was a potter's field because of the sore need for affordable rental housing.
"We said . . . 'Maybe we do need to open the Potter's Field land up.' We said, 'We are going to open this site and we are going to honor the ancestors who were here.' "
The burial ground, established in the 1700s, lies beneath the twin towers of the Queen Lane Apartments at Queen Lane and Pulaski Avenue. Those apartments are set to be demolished in the next few months, along with the adjacent Wissahickon Playground.
Neighbors and others noted that when the 16-story complex, with 119 apartments, was constructed, some graves and human remains were disturbed.
A brief history of the Germantown Potter's Field by the Germantown Historical Society notes that the lot that the burial ground would occupy was purchased in 1755 by Matthias Zimmerman for use as a "Burial Place for all Strangers, Negroes and Mulattoes as they Die in any part of Germantown forever."
The earliest known recorded burial was that of Christian Warner's "dead negro child" in 1766.
