The remains of 19 Black Philadelphians have finally been laid to rest, almost 200 years after they were stolen and corralled into the Morton Cranial Collection, the world’s largest 19th-century assemblage of human skulls. The individuals’ bones had been used to provide pseudo-scientific justification for white supremacy in the lead-up to the American civil war.
The Penn Museum, the branch of the University of Pennsylvania which has housed the remains since 1966, staged an interfaith service on Saturday to commemorate their restitution to hallowed ground.
“Finally, after nearly 200 years, we can begin to make it right,” said the Rev Charles Lattimore Howard, the university’s chaplain, at a service in the museum’s Harrison auditorium. He said the event was part memorial service, part truth-telling and repentance, part “an opportunity for closure”.
But the buildup to Saturday’s historic event – which marked one of the first voluntary burials of the remains of people of color from a major anatomical collection – was engulfed in controversy. Outside researchers and activists have accused the museum of ignoring the wishes of the local Black community, which wanted a more thorough investigation into the identity of the 19 individuals, who remain unidentified, before their bones were interred, and for the Penn Museum to loosen its control over the restitution process.
Amid the heated debate, the museum admitted that it had quietly laid the bones to rest on 22 January at Eden cemetery, the city’s earliest African American burial ground. The 19 Philadelphians’ remains had been placed in two simple grey granite mausoleums created specially for the purpose.
The collision of these conflicting ideas about approach left the event – one which academic institutions around the world are watching closely for clues as to how to conduct their own reparative processes – coming across as fraught and troubled. The Rev Dr J Wendell Mapson Jr, a pastor with the Monumental Baptist church, recognized as much at the memorial service.
“This commemoration,” he said, “has not come without some pain, discomfort and tension.”
A sordid history
The Morton Cranial Collection was amassed by Samuel Morton, a physician at Penn’s medical school who gathered about 900 craniums in the 1830s and 1840s from around the world. He measured the skulls in a spurious and thoroughly debunked attempt to prove that white people had larger brains and were more intelligent than other races.
After Morton’s death in 1851, skulls continued to be sent to the collection from around the globe, increasing its size to about 1,700 individual remains.
In recent years, the collection has come under mounting public scrutiny given its egregious uses in the pre-civil war period. According to Paul Wolff Mitchell, a leading researcher of the collection who is now at the University of Amsterdam, Morton was “about as infamous as anyone in the history of US scientific racism. He articulated perhaps the most extreme vision of white supremacy as scientific racist ideology in the 19th century.” Morton was also a leading proponent of polygenesis – the theory that different human races were in effect separate species.
The Penn Museum’s move to address the racism embedded in its anthropological collection was supercharged by the reckoning that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. A year later, the museum had to contend with further criticism when it was revealed that one of its top curators, Janet Monge, had used the bones of a child killed in the 1985 police bombing of a Black Philadelphia liberation group, Move, as a prop in her online classes on forensic anthropology. Relatives were unaware that the child’s remains were even in the university’s possession.
At Saturday’s service, John Jackson, the university’s provost, apologized for the possession and treatment of the bones. “The remains of these people – human beings, our brothers and sisters, anonymized, dehumanized – should never have been on display,” he said. “For that, on behalf of the entire university, please accept my regrets and deepest apologies.”
During his address, Howard noted that as a Black man connected with the Ivy League institution he felt “deep resentment and anger at the way Black bodies were stolen and disrespected”. He also expressed “deep pain at the bogus scientific research used to justify it”.
‘This is just to placate the community’
Little is currently known about the 12 women and seven men who have been laid to rest at Eden cemetery.
Finding Ceremony, a reparations project which has helped establish a descendants group around the Morton collection, has accused the museum of failing to conduct sufficient research on the provenance and identities of the skulls. Though the lack of names of the 19 has rendered it impossible to find their literal descendants, the group claims general ancestry as part of the Philadelphia Black community.
The project’s co-convener, Lyra Monteiro, said that her main objection to the way the restitution of the bones had been conducted is based on a fundamental justice principle: decisions over ancestral remains should not be made by the very institution that caused the harm. “The museum is calling the shots,” said Monteiro, who was denied entry to Saturday’s service. “They are not listening to descendants – they are making their own decisions, and we absolutely have a problem with that.”
Alex Wilson, a member of the descendants group who attended the commemoration, said that she was sceptical of the process conducted by the Penn Museum. She worried the event was “something just to placate the community”.
The museum insists that it does consult with the local community, working through the Morton collection’s community advisory group, which it founded in 2021. The panel consists of university and city officials, community organizations and spiritual advisers.
The museum also stresses that research on the remains is ongoing. Christopher Woods, the museum’s director, said at the memorial service that it was his “sincere hope that continued research will be successful in determining the identity of some of the remains”.
The fight for more adequate research
In 2021 Mitchell, the Morton collection researcher, published a report on the Black Philadelphians whose remains were held. The study, which helped inform the events leading to Saturday’s commemoration, chronicled how bodies of Black Philadelphians were often stolen from graves for dissection and anatomical research.
Many came from the former grounds of the Blockley almshouse, upon which the Penn Museum is built. Poor Black and white people, orphans and unhoused people resided at the institution in prison-like conditions, and after death their bones were often trafficked for medical research or for dispatch to the burgeoning Morton collection.
Some of the 19 are known to have been in the almshouse. It is almost certain, given the demographics of Philadelphia at the time Morton was collecting, that some were enslaved people at birth.
Finding Ceremony has conducted its own research, and discovered last month that the museum’s original plan to lay to rest a 20th Black Philadelphian may have been a violation of federal law because the remains belonged to a man with Native American ancestry.
The individual, John Voorhees, was the only Black Philadelphian in the group whose identity has been confirmed. He was listed in Morton’s own catalogue of his collection as a “mulatto” who died in the almshouse in 1846.
Finding Ceremony found that a few weeks before he died Voorhees was interviewed by the Quaker group which oversaw the almshouse. He told them that his mother was “an ‘Indian Squaw’”, suggesting that he was of part Native American descent.
Under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (Nagpra), Native American remains have to be returned to the relevant tribe or lineal descendant. As a result of Finding Ceremony’s discovery, the museum withdrew Voorhees’s skull from its burial plans.
A spokesperson for the Penn Museum said that the institution has always carried out its responsibilities under Nagpra, and that if a claim regarding Voorhees were made by a federally recognized tribe, the museum would consult with tribal representatives.
Monteiro, an assistant history professor at Rutgers University, said that the Voorhees experience exposed the inadequate nature of the museum’s research. She said that Finding Ceremony had evidence that could lead to the identification of five of the 19 individuals interred at Eden cemetery, which could in turn provide clues as to their descendants.
But she also said she feared that unless the university begins to put more resources into researching the provenance of the remains in the Morton collection, making a focused effort to uncover the human stories contained within them, then connections with the modern world could remain hidden. “The descendant community is in danger of losing the ability to lay to rest their own ancestors in a way that is meaningful for them,” she cautioned.
For his part, Woods said that the Eden cemetery mausoleums had been built above ground precisely to allow access: “If future research should learn of the identification of any of the individuals, their remains can easily be retrieved and returned to their families.”
At the end of a poignant day in Philadelphia, the ceremony left attendees looking to the future. A historic step had been taken, fraught with tension though it may have been. Still, many more difficult decisions lie ahead relating to as many as 1,500 other human remains stored in the Morton collection.
As Dr Mapson put it: “Society treats its dead as it treats its living, not always with dignity, sometimes with contempt … If the same mistakes are made again, shame on us.”
