For decades, the University of Pennsylvania has preserved hundreds of skulls that were once used to promote white supremacy through racist scientific research.
As part of a growing effort by museums to reevaluate the management of human remains, the Ivy League school last week buried some of the remains, specifically those identified as belonging to 19 black Philadelphia residents. Officials plan to hold a memorial service for them on Saturday.
The university says it is trying to correct past mistakes. But some community members feel left out of the process, illustrating the challenges institutions face in addressing institutional racism.
“Repatriation must be part of what the museum does, and we must embrace it,” said Christopher Woods, director of the museum.
The university is home to more than a thousand human remains from around the world, and Woods said repatriating those identified as from the local community was the best place to start.
Some leaders and advocates from affected Black communities in Philadelphia have opposed the plan for years. They say the decision to rebury the remains at Eden Cemetery, a local historic black cemetery, was made without their input.
West Philadelphia native and community activist Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad said justice doesn’t just mean the university doing the right thing, but letting the community decide what that looks like.
“That is not repatriation. We say Christopher Woods should not decide to do that,” Muhammad said. “The same institution that has maintained and exercised control over these imprisoned ancestors for years is not the same institution that can give them ceremonies.”
As the movement for racial justice has swept the country in recent years, many museums and universities have begun to prioritize the repatriation of collections that were stolen or taken under unethical circumstances. But only one group of people often harmed by archeology and anthropology, Native Americans, has a federal law regulating this process.
In such cases between the University of Pennsylvania and Black Philadelphians, institutions retain control over the collections and how they are returned.
The remains of the Black Philadelphians were part of the Morton Cranial Collection at the Penn Museum. Beginning in the 1830s, physician and professor Samuel George Morton collected approximately 900 skulls, and after his death the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences added hundreds more.
Morton’s goal with the collection was to prove by measuring skulls that the races were actually different types of people, with white being the superior type. His racist pseudoscience influenced generations of scientific research and was used to justify slavery in the antebellum South.
Morton was also a medical professor in Philadelphia, where most physicians of his day trained, says Lyra Monteiro, an anthropological archaeologist and professor at Rutgers University. The remnants of his since-refuted work are still visible in the medical community, she said.
“Medical racism can therefore really exist,” Monteiro said. “His ideas became part of the way medical students were trained.”
The collection has been housed at the university since 1966 and some of the remains were only used for education in 2020. The university apologized and revised its protocol for handling human remains in 2021.
The university also formed an advisory committee to decide next steps. The group decided to rebury the remains in the Eden Cemetery. The following year, the university successfully petitioned the Philadelphia Orphans’ Court to allow the burial, on the grounds that the identities of all but one black Philadelphian were unknown.
Critics note that the advisory committee was composed almost entirely of university officials and local religious leaders, and no other community members.
Monteiro and other researchers challenged the idea that Philadelphians’ identity had been lost over time. Through the city’s public records, she discovered that one of the men’s mothers was Native American. His remains must be repatriated through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the federal law that governs the return of Native American ancestral remains and burial objects, she said.
“They never did any research on who these people were; they took Morton at his word,” Monteiro said. “The people who aren’t even willing to do the research shouldn’t be doing it.”
The university removed that skull from the reburial so it could be assessed for return through NAGPRA. Monteiro and others were further outraged to discover that the university had already buried the remains of other Black Philadelphians out of public view last weekend, she said.
Members of the Black Philadelphians Descendant Community Group, which was organized by people including Muhammad who identify as descendants of the individuals in the mausoleum, said in a statement that they are “devastated.” & pain” that the funeral took place without them.
“In light of this new information, they are taking time to process and reflect on how they can best honor their ancestors in the future,” the group said, adding that members plan to commemorate Saturday to hand out handouts with information they have collected about the individuals. in the mausoleum.
“To balance prioritizing the human dignity of individuals, conservation due diligence and the logistical requirements of the Historic Eden Cemetery, the laying to rest of the 19 Black Philadelphians was scheduled prior to the interfaith ceremony and blessing,” the Penn Museum said in a statement to The Washington Post. Associated press.
Woods said he believes most of the community is happy with the decision to rebury the remains at Eden Cemetery, and that there is a vocal minority that opposes it. He hopes that eventually all individuals in the mausoleum will be identified and returned.
“We encourage future research,” Woods said, noting that the remains of Black Philadelphians had been in the collection for two centuries and that he, along with his staff, felt the need to take immediate action do something with those remains.
“Let’s not let these individuals sit in the museum’s storage room and extend it for another 200 years,” he said.
Even if all the skulls are identified and returned to the community, the university still has a long way to go. More than 300 Native American remains in the Morton Cranial Collection still must be repatriated under federal law. Woods said the museum recently hired additional staff to expedite that process.
___
Graham Brewer is a member of AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow him on social media.
