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Skulls of 19 black Americans returned to New Orleans in Germany after more than a century, where they were sent to racist research.
Jacob Cochran/Dillard University
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Jacob Cochran/Dillard University
Marie Louise was a lifelong new Orleanian who died of malnutrition. Hiram Malone came to Louisiana from Alabama, a hospital dial with a fatal case of pneumonia. Samuel Prince was a 40-year-old cook who succumbed to tuberculosis.
They belonged to 19 black patients who died in a hospital in New Orleans in the 1870s and whose heads were removed from a doctor to Germany. There were the crania studied as a “specimen” In a proliferating pseudo -oscillation of phenology. It made connections between the intellect or morality of a person and the size or form of their skull, with some doctors the superiority of a breed over another theoret.
The skulls of these 19 patients have now been returned to Louisiana abroad after more than a century. On Saturday they were honored at a multi-gloss gem and based in a jazz burial in the New Orleans tradition.
“We can’t be sure where they came from. And so we have them. And what should we make of what happened to them?” Eva Baham, a historian of Dillard University who headed the cultural repatriation Committee, said During the service on Saturday. “You can be angry. You could rightly be annoyed. But we can’t stay there.”
The remains were returned by The University of Leipzig, which in 2023 contacted the city archaeologist in New Orleans. recognition The skulls were acquired in a “colonial context and unethical”. The two-year return process included city, state and academic institutions. It culminated in a remarkable international refund, a return of African -American remains from Europe – with many there is still archive collections in the USA and abroad at museums and universities.
The researchers assume that many of the 19 people had been enslaved, were later moved freely after the civil war and finally became sick or were institutionalized in asylum before landing at the charity Hospital in New Orleans. It was one of the oldest hospitals in the nation and served the arms of the city for centuries. It was closed in 2005 due to damage by the hurricane Katrina. The death records of the hospital helped Baham’s team reconstruction Some biographical moments of the 13 men and four women. Two people are not identified.
In the monument on Saturday, a group of Dillard students read from these biographies that end with their return trip:
“Another trip over the Atlantic, the enslaved Africans came by on the sea floor,” said the pupil’s report. “From Africa to Caribbean to the United Sates of America; from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Leipzig, Germany; from Leipzig, Germany to New Orleans, Louisiana – carries 19 men and women home. May them freely go in the city of God, dignity and honor.”
The ceremony on Saturday comprises prayers of ten religious leaders of various faiths, with an African drum and dance performance, which the participants brought out of the chapel. Handler in white gloves wore commemorative vessels that contained the skulls for the funeral. And a jazz band accompanied the procession.
“The lives of these people had the meaning,” said Baham during the monument and later added: “The story should not turn or wrap itself.