There was very little to say about the 19 people who were eulogized Saturday morning at a service at the University of Pennsylvania. Their names were lost and not much was known about their lives beyond the most basic facts: an old age they spent in a nursing home, a problem with cavities. They were blacks who had died in obscurity more than a century ago and are now known almost entirely from the skulls they left behind. Even some of these few facts have been questioned.
Much more could be said about what led to the service. “This moment,” said the Rev. Jesse Wendell Mapson, a local pastor involved in planning the commemoration and burial of the 19, “has not come without some pain, discomfort and tension.”
Everyone could agree on this.
The Museum of Archeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, like cultural and research institutions around the world, has been grappling with a legacy of looting, trying to decide what to do with the artifacts and even human bones that were collected from people and communities against their will and often without their knowledge.
The museum plans to repatriate hundreds of skulls from around the world, but the process has been complicated from the beginning. His first step, the burial in a nearby cemetery of the skulls of black Philadelphians found in the collection, has drawn sharp criticism, accused by activists and some experts of being hasty and opaque.
“There are so many places that deal with this,” said Aja Lans, a professor of anthropology and Africana studies at Johns Hopkins University, who has criticized the Penn Museum’s handling of Morton’s remains. “Anyone who works with human remains is paying attention to what is 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 effort to bolster an influential but scientifically false theory of racial hierarchy. Like many doctors and medical students of his time, he looted the corpses of the poor and mentally ill from the city’s asylum.
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 moved to the Penn Museum, where they remained for decades, some of them on a classroom shelf, visible through a window to anyone waiting at the nearby bus stop.
The collection began to attract attention in recent years, driven by research at Penn and national calls for a reckoning with historical racism. In February 2021, a Ph.D. Student Paul Wolff Mitchell wrote a report in which he found that Morton’s collection included the skulls of at least 14 black Philadelphians, some of whom were probably born into slavery.
The museum, which had agreed to repatriate all the skulls in Morton’s collection, formed a committee to arrange the burial of these and six other skulls that also appeared to be those of Philadelphia blacks. In addition to university officials and local clergy, the committee included Aliy A. Muhammad, a community activist who was one of the first to make public that the museum contained some bones of children killed in a famous police-ordered bombing in 1985.
Max. Muhammad, who identifies as non-binary, insisted that decisions about the remains should not fall to the museum but to the descendant community, people who have deep roots in black Philadelphia. Together with Lyra D. Monteiro, professor of history at Rutgers University, Mx. Muhammad formed a group called Search ceremony, which demanded that the museum transfer the collection to the group and fund research into the identities of the hundreds of people whose skulls it had preserved. Of the 20 people the museum planned to bury, only one (a janitor named John Voorhees, who died of tuberculosis in 1846) was known by his name.
The fight between the museum committee and Finding Ceremony went to court, and in February last year, a judge ruled in favor of the museum, ordering that the burial take place within a year. The committee planned to entomb the remains in a mausoleum at Eden Cemetery, a historic black cemetery.
Having lost in court, Dr. Monteiro reviewed the local archives. Finding names was a daunting task; Many of the people whose remains ended up in Morton’s collection were described in Morton’s records in only the crudest terms.
“It seems unlikely to me that all of these people will be identified,” said Christopher Woods, director of the Penn Museum since 2021. Dr. Woods, who is the museum’s first Black director, noted that even if one person could be named, the person could have hundreds of descendants to consult. The process, he said, could take years.
“Institutions have too often used the assertion of future research or more conclusive research as a tool of inaction,” he added. The remains were intentionally placed above ground, in a mausoleum, she said, so they could be recovered if ongoing investigative efforts revealed identities.
Then, in mid-January, Finding Ceremony announced a discovery. Dr. Monteiro had found in the city archives an 1846 interview with John Voorhees, in which he said that his mother was Native American. Therefore, his skull was covered by federal law regulating Native American remains. The only named person of the 20 who were to be buried was removed.
To critics of the process, this was proof that the museum’s approach had been too hasty. It also raised questions about how much the museum really knew about the other 19.
“What does this suggest 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 contrasted it with what he saw as the more meticulous approach adopted by some other institutions. “Frankly, the way this repair process is carried out is really important,” she said.
A museum spokesman said archival research into the identities was continuing and the museum was working with an independent genealogy expert.
Compounding the ire of the museum’s critics, days before Saturday’s ceremony word spread that the royal burial had taken place quietly on January 22. “It was shocking,” Mx said. Muhammad, who like many had understood that the ceremony of February 3 implied the burial itself, as the website seemed to suggest.
Museum committee members said separating the physical burial from the public ceremony had always been the plan given the logistical complications of burial. The spokesperson said the museum had informed people about this beforehand in a statement sent to the museum’s email list.
Beyond prayers, hymns and a drum procession, Saturday’s event was as much an act of atonement as it was an act of commemoration. Several university officials, all of them black, apologized for what the chancellor, John L. Jackson Jr., called the “sordid story” behind the Morton collection.
As attendees left the commemoration, many heading to a graveside service at the cemetery, people affiliated with Finding Ceremony stood outside the auditorium handing out leaflets. The fliers questioned the museum’s claims about the identities of some of the 19 who had been buried and gave crumbs of known biographies about the others.
“He was born before 1760 and lived to be 80 years old,” said one. “Wherever she was born, she was almost certainly enslaved for decades. When she died in Philadelphia, she was free.”
