Skulls of 19 Black people returned to New Orleans after 150 years

Dillard University will hold a ceremony to honor 19 Black people whose remains were wrongfully taken from Louisiana to Germany in the late 1800s for racist scientific research.

The university received the individuals' skulls May 15 from the University of Leipzig, where they had been housed for more than 150 years. On May 31, each of the 19 people – some of whom were born in New Orleans or had only been in the city for days or weeks – will be honored in a historic memorial and jazz funeral.

Each of the individuals had died in New Orleans' Charity Hospital in the early 1870s. Their skulls were removed and brought to Leipzig for research centered on a pseudo-science that sought to prove the racial superiority of white people by analyzing skulls. Such "research" was practiced in the United States and used in the Antebellum South to justify slavery.

Monique Guillory, the president of Dillard University, one of two historically Black colleges and universities in Louisiana, said at a news conference that the memorial service will be about "confronting a dark chapter in medical and scientific history, and choosing instead a path of justice, honor and remembrance."

The individuals were "stripped of their dignity" and subjected to a "colonial scientific practice rooted in racism and exploitation," Guillory said.

"They were people with names. They were people with stories and histories," she added. "Some of them had families – mothers, fathers, daughters, sons. They were human beings, not specimens, not numbers."

How did Dillard University get the remains back?

The process to bring home the remains began about two years ago and involved Dillard, the Louisiana Department of Justice, the city of New Orleans, the University of Leipzig and other community organizations.

Dillard University took up the charge and formed a Cultural Repatriation Committee, which focused on planning a honorary service and researching the lives of the individuals in an attempt to locate their descendants, said Eva Baham, a retired Dillard professor who led the committee.

With a list of names provided by the city of Leipzig, Baham said she and and a small working group began scouring historical records. Their biggest break came when they searched through archives at the public library and discovered most of their names in the records of New Orleans' Charity Hospital.

The group found that the individuals had died between December 1871 and January 1872, Baham said at a news conference. The records also provided vital information about their background, including where they were born and how long they had been in New Orleans.

"We have people who were here in New Orleans from one hour in 1871, one day, a week, two months," she said. "Ten of the 19 individuals were in New Orleans less than six years."

Baham also noted that most of them arrived in New Orleans after the Civil War, which ended in 1865. Only two were lifelong New Orleans residents, making it difficult for the group to find descendants.

"We were not able, at this time, to connect them solidly to certain places, addresses," she said. "Searching for the descendants is not impossible but highly improbable within a certain amount of time."

'Now they are home'

As they researched the history of the 19 individuals, the committee forged ahead and planned a memorial service and jazz funeral – a traditional New Orleans procession that features a brass band.

"We are not talking about them as if they're skeletal remains," Baham said. "We want to honor them by calling them the individuals that they are."

The university listed their names as 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.

Two of them have not been identified.

Dillard University received the remains from Leipzig and held a brief, solemn ceremony at a local funeral home May 15 at which the committee members read aloud what was known about each of the 19 people – where they were born, where they have lived and when they arrived in New Orleans.

Along with the ceremony, the upcoming funeral will be a "homecoming and a final home going" in typical New Orleans fashion, Guillory said.

"These people mattered," she said. "They belonged here, and now they are home."