Amid a fraught lawsuit, a Philadelphia museum is burying the remains of 19 black people

There was very little to say about the 19 people who were praised Saturday morning at a service at the University of Pennsylvania. Their names were lost, and little more was known about their lives than the barest of facts: an old age spent in the poorhouse, a problem with cavities. They were black people who had died in obscurity over a century ago and were now known almost entirely through the skulls they left behind. Even some of these scant facts have been disputed.

There is much more to say about what led to the service. “This moment,” said the Rev. Jesse Wendell Mapson, a local pastor involved in planning the 19's memorial and burial, “has not come without some pain, discomfort and tension.”

Everyone could agree on this.

The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, like cultural and research institutions around the world, is grappling with a legacy of looting, trying to decide what to do with artifacts and even human bones that are taken against their will and often collected from people and communities. without their knowledge.

The museum plans to repatriate hundreds of skulls from around the world, but the process has been fraught from the start. The first step — burying the skulls of black Philadelphians found in the collection in a nearby cemetery — has drawn heavy criticism, accused by activists and some experts of being hasty and opaque.

“There are so many places that relate to this,” said Aja Lans, a professor of anthropology and Africana studies at Johns Hopkins University, who has criticized the Penn Museum's handling of the Morton remains. “Anyone who works with human remains is paying attention to what's happening at Penn. No one wants to replicate what is happening.”

In the early and mid-19th century, Samuel George Morton, a Philadelphia physician and naturalist, amassed one of the largest known collections of human skulls in an attempt to support an influential but scientifically bogus theory of racial hierarchy. Like many doctors and medical students of his time, he looted the carcasses of the poor and mentally ill from the city's workhouse.

The collection continued to grow after Morton's death in 1851, but was largely forgotten, along with his odious theories. In 1966, the bones were transferred to the Penn Museum, where they remained for decades, some sitting on a shelf in a classroom, visible through a window to anyone waiting at the nearby bus stop.

The collection began to attract attention in recent years, fueled by research at Penn and the national call to reckon with historical racism. In February 2021, obtained a Ph.D. student, Paul Wolff Mitchell, wrote a report discovering that the Morton Collection contained the skulls of at least fourteen black Philadelphians, some of whom were most likely born into slavery.

The museum, which had pledged to repatriate all skulls in the Morton collection, formed a committee to arrange the burial of these and six more skulls that also appeared to belong to Black Philadelphians. In addition to university officials and local clergy, the committee included Aliy A. Muhammad, a community activist who was among the first to announce that the museum held some of the bones of children killed in a notorious police-ordered firebombing in 1985.

MX. Mohammed, who identifies as non-binary, emphasized that decisions about the remains should not rest with the museum, but with the community of descendants, people who have deep roots in Black Philadelphia. Together with Lyra D. Monteiro, a history professor at Rutgers University, Mx. Mohammed formed a group called Finding Ceremony, which demanded that the museum turn over the collection to the group and fund research into the identities of the hundreds of people whose skulls it had preserved. Of the twenty people the museum wanted to bury, only one was known by name: a porter named John Voorhees, who died of tuberculosis in 1846.

The battle between the museum committee and Finding Ceremony went to court and in February last year a judge ruled in favor of the museum and determined that the funeral had to take place within a year. The committee planned to bury the remains in a mausoleum at Eden Cemetery, a historically black cemetery.

After losing in court, Dr. Monteiro from the local archives. Finding names was quite a task; Many of the people whose remains ended up in the Morton collection were described in only the crudest terms in Morton's archives.

“It seems unlikely to me that all of these individuals will be identified,” said Christopher Woods, director of the Penn Museum since 2021. Dr. Woods, the museum's first black director, pointed out that even if a person could be identified named, the person may have hundreds of descendants to consult. According to him, the process could take years.

“Institutions have too often used the claim of future research or more conclusive research as a tool of inaction,” he added. The remains were deliberately placed above ground, in a mausoleum, he said, so they could be recovered if ongoing investigative efforts yield identities.

Then, in mid-January, Finding Ceremony announced a discovery. Dr. Monteiro had found an 1846 interview with John Voorhees in the city's archives, in which he said his mother was Native American. His skull therefore fell under the federal law regulating the remains of Native Americans. The only named person of the twenty to be buried was taken out.

To critics of the process, this was evidence that the museum's approach had been too hasty. It also raised questions about how much the museum really knew about the 19 others.

“What does this say about the thoroughness of the investigation?” asked Dr. Mitchell, whose report first drew attention to black Philadelphians in the collection, and who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Dr. Mitchell said he welcomed Penn's openness to the return of human remains, but this contrasted with what he saw as the a more rigorous approach from some other institutions. “Frankly, how you do this repair process is very important,” he said.

A spokesperson for the museum said that archival research into the identities continues and that the museum is working with an independent genealogy expert.

The anger of the museum's critics increased when word spread a few days before Saturday's ceremony that the actual funeral had taken place quietly on January 22. “It was shocking,” Mx said. Muhammad, who, like many, understood that the February 3 ceremony was accompanied by the funeral itself the website seemed to suggest.

Members of the museum committee said separating the physical burial and the public ceremony had always been the plan, given the logistical complications of the funeral. The spokesperson said the museum had informed people about this in advance in a press release sent to the museum's email list.

In addition to prayers, hymns and a drumming procession, Saturday's event was both an act of reconciliation and commemoration. Several university officials, all black, apologized for what the provost, John L. Jackson Jr., called the “sordid history” behind the Morton collection.

As attendees left the memorial, many of them heading to a graveside service at the cemetery, people associated with Finding Ceremony stood outside the venue and handed out fliers. The airmen questioned the museum's claims about the identities of some of the nineteen who had been buried and provided crumbs of biography known about the others.

“She was born before 1760 and lived to be 80 years old,” it said. “Wherever she was born, she was almost certainly a slave for decades. By the time she died in Philadelphia, she was free.