More than 150 years after their heads were severed from their bodies and shipped to Germany for “research,” the craniums of 19 Black people, which were recently returned, will be memorialized Saturday during a sacred ceremony in New Orleans.
Dillard University President Monique Guillory said at a news conference Wednesday that the memorial will be “about confronting a dark chapter in medical and scientific history while choosing a path of justice, honor and remembrance.”
Those who will be honored died in the city’s Charity Hospital in 1872. Their heads were severed and shipped to Leipzig University in Germany to be studied — a common practice at the time, as researchers sought to confirm their unfounded theory that Black people’s brains were smaller than those of other races, therefore making them inferior.
“They were stripped of their dignity,” Guillory said, over “a practice rooted in racism and exploitation. They were people with names. They were people with stories and histories. Some of them had families, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, human beings.” They were not specimens, she continued, “not numbers.”
The heads were returned to New Orleans about a week ago after a two-year journey, said Eva Baham, a retired Dillard professor. Representatives from Leipzig contacted the city in 2023 about their existence in Germany, where the university houses a skull collection dating to the 1800s. The school is in the process of repatriating or sending back skulls to their original locations. That initial call set in motion the creation of the Cultural Repatriation Committee, led by Baham.
“We are not talking about them as if they are skeletal remains,” Baham said at the news conference. “We want to honor them by calling them the individuals that they are.”
Dillard, a historically Black university, welcomed the opportunity to be part of “this very sensitive acknowledgment of our people, that they are here,” Guillory told NBC News. A visitation will take place Saturday at Dillard’s Lawless Memorial Chapel with a service. Laid to rest will be the remains of Adam Grant, Isaak Bell, Hiram Smith, William Pierson, Henry Williams, John Brown, Hiram Malone, William Roberts, Alice Brown, Prescilla Hatchet, Marie Louise, Mahala, Samuel Prince, John Tolman, Henry Allen, Moses Willis and Henry Anderson.
The two other people could not be identified.
The committee tried in vain for two years to contact descendants of the victims but had no success. They did learn some information, Baham said, and found their names listed in municipal death records almost in succession.
“In those records list what they died from, how long they had been in New Orleans,” she said. “We have people who were here in New Orleans from one hour in 1871, one day, a week, two months. And that’s all very important.”
Guillory said the service will be a New Orleans expression of respect.
“We will do so in the most sacred way that we know how in our beloved city, in a true New Orleans fashion, with a jazz funeral that shows the world that these people mattered,” she said. “We have a very different relationship with death here and a very different relationship with what we believe is the spirit and our ancestors. And now they are home. And so, this is particularly poignant for people in New Orleans.”
When the opportunity arose, there were questions from people in the academic and local community, Guillory said, about why the parties involved would welcome their return. But the city, University Medical Center New Orleans, Dillard University and other entities did not blink.
“There’s certain sensitivity to the material, to the macabre, somber nature of what we’re talking about,” Guillory said. “There was also a lot of uncertainty about whether we could actually bring them here. Should we bring them here? Who should be responsible for bringing them here? Why bring them back? And I think the committee itself had been very confident and convinced that this was the right thing to do.”
The remains will be stored at the Hurricane Katrina Memorial.
“We want that day to be not only of remembrance but of reckoning and renewal,” Guillory said, “and may we never forget them.”
