Museum buries bones of 19 Black Philadelphians, causing rift
Philadelphia — For decades, the University of Pennsylvania has held hundreds of skulls that once were used to promote white supremacy through racist scientific research.
As part of a growing effort among museums to reevaluate the curation of human remains, the Ivy League school laid some of the remains to rest last week, specifically those identified as belonging to 19 Black Philadelphians. Officials held a memorial service for them on Saturday.
The university says it is trying to begin rectifying past wrongs. But some community members feel excluded from the process, illustrating the challenges that institutions face in addressing institutional racism.
“Repatriation should be part of what the museum does, and we should embrace it,” said Christopher Woods, the museum’s director.
Some feel input was needed
The university houses more than 1,000 human remains from all over the world, and Woods said repatriating those identified as from the local community felt like the best place to start.
Some leaders and advocates for the affected Black communities in Philadelphia have pushed back against the plan for years. They say the decision to reinter the remains in Eden Cemetery, a local historic Black cemetery, was made without their input.
West Philadelphia native and community activist aAliy A. Muhammad said justice isn’t just the university doing the right thing, it’s letting the community decide what that should look like.
“That’s not repatriation. We’re saying that Christopher Woods does not get to decide to do that,” Muhammad said. “The same institution that has been holding and exerting control for years over these captive ancestors is not the same institution that can give them ceremony.”
Potential to be identified
Woods told the crowd at Saturday’s interfaith commemoration at the university’s Penn Museum that the identities of the 19 people were not recorded, but that the process of interment in above-ground mausoleums “is by design fully reversible if the facts and circumstances change.” If future research allows any of the remains to be identified and a claim is made, they can be “easily retrieved and entrusted to descendants,” he said.
“It will be a very happy day if we can return at least some of these fellow citizens to their descendants,” Woods said.
At a blessing and committal ceremony later at Eden Cemetery, about 10 miles southwest of the museum in Collingdale, Renee McBride Williams, a member of the community advisory group, said she was “relived that finally the people who created the problem are finding a solution.”
“In my home growing up, when you made a mistake, you fixed it — you accepted responsibility for what you did,” she said.
“We may not know their names, but they lived, and they are remembered, and they will not be forgotten,” said the Rev. Charles Lattimore Howard, the university’s chaplain and vice president for social equity & community.
As the racial justice movement has swept across the country in recent years, many museums and universities have begun to prioritize the repatriation of collections that were either stolen or taken under unethical circumstances. But only one group of people often harmed by archaeology and anthropology, Native Americans, have a federal law that regulates this process.
In cases like that between the University of Pennsylvania and Black Philadelphians, institutions maintain 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 about 900 crania, and after his death the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia added hundreds more.
Morton’s goal with the collection was to prove — by measuring crania — that the races were actually different species of humans, with white being the superior species. His racist pseudoscience influenced generations of scientific research and was used to justify slavery in the antebellum South.
Morton also was a medical professor in Philadelphia, where most doctors of his time trained, said Lyra Monteiro, an anthropological archaeologist and professor at Rutgers University. The vestiges of his since-disproven work are still evident across the medical field, she said.
“Medical racism can really exist on the back of that,” Monteiro said. “His ideas became part of how medical students were trained.”
The collection has been housed at the university since 1966, and some of the remains were used for teaching as late as 2020. The university issued an apology in 2021 and revised its protocol for handling human remains.