What Remains, Part 1: No Justice, No Peace

A classroom display of human skulls sparks a reckoning at The Penn Museum in Philadelphia.

This episode contains swears.

Featuring Paul Wolff Mitchell, Christopher Woods, Lyra Monteiro, aAliy Muhammad.

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL

The Morton Cranial Collection

The MOVE bombing and MOVE remains controversy

CREDITS

Host: Nate Hegyi

Reported and produced by Felix Poon with help from Taylor Quimby

Mixed by Felix Poon and Taylor Quimby

Editing by Taylor Quimby, with help from Nate Hegyi, Rebecca Lavoie, Katie Colaneri, Jason Moon, Daniela Allee, Todd Bookman, Justine Paradis, Marina Henke, and Kate Dario

Executive producer: Taylor Quimby

Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio

Special thanks to Buffy Gorilla.

Music in this episode is from Lennon Hutton, and Blue Dot Sessions. The theme music for the What Remains mini-series is by Lennon Hutton.

The What Remains cover art is by Sara Plourde.

Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

Submit a question to the “Outside/Inbox.” We answer queries about the natural world, climate change, sustainability, and human evolution. You can send a voice memo to outsidein@nhpr.org or leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837).

Audio Transcript

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

OPEN

FP: In 2018, Paul Wolff Mitchell was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. He was teaching an intro to anthropology course. And one day, a student came up to talk to him at the end of class.

Paul Wolff Mitchell: And he was really, really bright. And but he was very shy  because he was the youngest person in the, in the classroom.

FP: He was actually a high school student given permission to take a few courses at Penn.

Paul Wolff Mitchell: both of his parents were from Nigeria, and he started to ask me why there were all of these. These skulls on the wall in this classroom

[MUX IN]

FP: All around this particular classroom, were hundreds of human skulls, yellowed with age, and lined in wooden cabinets in rows…  the way you might display antique pottery.  

Most of them had labels pasted across their foreheads. 

Paul Wolff Mitchell: The student asked me, why is it that there are these skulls that are labeled, uh, as coming from Africa?

Paul went on to explain that these hundreds of skulls were from all over the world, (but the ones he was asking about), were from people born in Africa… 

…who were taken across the Atlantic to Cuba…  

… where they were enslaved, and died.

Some time later,  their skulls were exhumed, and sent to Philadelphia…

… to a doctor and scientist named Samuel Morton. 

[mux post/change]

Morton earned his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania, and then acted as an advisor to Penn’s medical students. He went on to be known as “the father of physical anthropology.”

But he was also – in one of the most literal uses of the term – racist. 

He believed that human races are separate species.

And, that they can be ranked, with White people like him, at the top.  

And, Paul explained to this kid, that Morton set out to prove it by amassing a collection of hundreds of human skulls, which he filled with lead shot and seeds to test their capacity. 

Morton was so influential that Charles Darwin called him an “authority” on the subject  of race.

This was all happening before the Civil War, by the way. And to be clear - this pseudoscientific brand of white supremacy has been utterly debunked. 

But here it was, on full display, in 2018. 

Paul Wolff Mitchell: As I explained it I realized, you know, the more context that I'm giving it's not justifying this or making this any better.

The Morton Cranial Collection, as it’s called, includes an estimated 1 thousand 3 hundred skulls… All of them, held in various states of storage… at the prestigious Penn Museum, UPenn’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.  

Paul Wolff Mitchell: I am a white person, and I don't think that for me initially, um, and it's it's something that, uh, you know, I'm not proud of, but it simply is the case that I don’t think initially I asked enough questions. I sort of was not critical enough about the history.

[mux/tone/beat shift]

FP: In the past couple of decades, elite schools like Penn have been wrestling with their ties to slavery. 

Brown University published a report in 2006 acknowledging the quote, “deep, intertwined history of the slave trade and the university.”

Georgetown apologized for the sale of hundreds of enslaved people in the 1800s. 

But not Penn.

Paul Wolff Mitchell: The narrative went something like the University of Pennsylvania is in Philadelphia. Philadelphia is north of the Mason-Dixon line. Uh, the northern states were not slave states. Therefore, uh, the University of Pennsylvania has no complicity in slavery. And um… a spokesman for Penn had stated that there was no slavery in Penn's DNA.

FP: No slavery in Penn’s DNA. 

A handful of students – including Paul Wolff Mitchell - heard this statement, and they took it as a challenge.  

They dug into archives and records. And here’s what they found: 

Penn itself never enslaved people. But members of the faculty and trustees did. 

Plus, the school went after donations from wealthy enslavers in southern states. 

AND Penn is home to the nation’s oldest medical school - where Samuel Morton taught his white supremecist theories about race and intelligence. 

Paul Wolff Mitchell: race was a major part of the medical curriculum. Racial science was integral to how physicians were trained, and Morton played a big role in that history within, uh, within Philadelphia.

[mux/tone/beat shift]

In 2019, a few years after that student first asked Paul about the African skulls - he and a group of Penn students reported their findings at public meetings.

And Paul paid special attention to the Morton Collection; evidence of racism that wasn’t just buried in Penn’s DNA, but was literally staring students in the face from behind glass cabinets every day.  

A local activist was there, and they were outraged. And they spoke up about it.

Paul Wolff Mitchell: saying in effect, that they could not believe that this was the case and asking, why is it that they didn't know this? Uh, having been a lifelong resident of West Philadelphia.

Afterwards, the activist started a Change.org petition, calling for the skulls to be returned to their descendants. To be repatriated.

But from the official holders of the Morton Cranial Collection…. Crickets. 

Paul Wolff Mitchell: and there was no response by the museum. Um, there was no response, um in any official capacity. And that's where things stood.

But then… came the summer of 2020. 

[MUX CREEPS IN]

Protestors: Say her name. Breonna Taylor! Say her name. Breonna Taylor!
Protestors: Black lives matter! Black lives matter! Black lives matter!

Protestors: No justice! No peace! No justice! No peace! No justice! No peace!

FP: This is What Remains - a special series from  Outside/In. I’m Felix Poon. 

When I first got interested in human remains collections, I thought it was just a grotesque story about philosophy, science, and ethics. 

But the more I talked to people, the more they told me that I COULD NOT understand this in the abstract. 

And that the place I should really be focusing on is Philadelphia…

Where one institution’s attempt to reckon with their past has been met with anger and distrust.  

Christopher Woods: I mean this is the type of elitism and colonialism we’re fighting against. Outsiders dictating what should be done.

Lyra Monteiro: I’m gonna say that academics are really fucking arrogant. Um we're talking about a problem that's created by their arrogance.

This is Part ONE: No Justice. No peace. 

PART ONE

FP: For many decades, the Morton Cranial Collection has been housed at the Penn Museum. It’s a world-renowned archaeology and anthropology museum on the campus of UPenn, in West Philadelphia.

And in the first week of June, 2020…

Paul Wolff Mitchell: after the murder of George Floyd, uh, the Penn Museum, like a number of different institutions through the summer of 2020, made a statement in this case on its social media profile

This again, is Paul Wolff Mitchell. 

The Penn’s Museum’s statement acknowledged its colonial foundations.

Quote: “Racism has no place in our Museum. We must do more.”

And then in big letters posted on their Instagram feed, it said: 

“To our Black staff, students, members, visitors, and Philadelphia neighbors… WE STAND WITH YOU.”

Today, Paul is an anthropologist working in the Netherlands. But at the time… he was still a graduate student. And the Instagram post kind of bothered his research assistant, Mar Portillo Alvarado. Mar posed a rhetorical question…

Paul Wolff Mitchell: which was, well, what does it mean if the museum says that it's standing in solidarity with the black community? If there are the remains of enslaved people, that it's still on display in a classroom.

[MUX IN]

Paul was like, you’re right. But you don’t have to convince me. Why don’t you wri te about it for the  school paper?

So that’s what Mar did. 

And THIS TIME…after George Floyd’s murder…  it got the museum’s attention. 

Paul Wolff Mitchell: the museum says they'll change the mode of display. They're going to frost the glass on the collection.

But then, more pressure piled on…

Paul Wolff Mitchell: And then ultimately, they say they'll take the remains off of display

The campus movement to abolish the police, which started in the wake of George Floyd’s murder… it gave rise to a parallel demand to “abolish the collection”…

Paul Wolff Mitchell: then, you know, ultimately with more and more pressure on attention, they say they will look into, um, uh, restitution or repatriation for the remains of enslaved people.

[MUX OUT]

Less than two months after Mar’s article, the Penn Museum put together a committee. 

Initially, their scope was limited - to decide what to do with the enslaved individuals in the Morton Collection – namely the 55 skulls of Africans from Cuba. 

Ever since that public meeting in 2019, it was these skulls that had been the focus of the most outrage. 

But… Paul thought it was kind of weird that the Museum was so focused on such a small number. After all there were a thousand 300 skulls in this collection, gathered without consent, from grave robbers, and unclaimed bodies from morgues and poorhouses.

So he decided to look into it more. 

And he started with archival records from another historic institution in Philadelphia: The Blockley Almshouse. 

Paul Wolff Mitchell: to call it a hospital would be, um, would be somewhat inaccurate. It was, uh, it was really a place of care of last resort, often for the poorest Philadelphians. Um, there were a large number of black Philadelphians at this institution.  the people who were at the almshouse were referred to as inmates. In many cases, these individuals would have been there, um, uh, involuntarily or they were not would not be able to voluntarily leave.

The Blockley Almshouse was one of the first government-sponsored poorhouses in the country. It had several wings - there was a hospital, an orphanage, an insane asylum. 

It was also known among patients as a hot-spot for grave-robbing. To be buried there was to risk being dug up and dissected by medical students. 

And, it just so happens, that Samuel Morton worked at the Blockley Almshouse as a physician. 

Paul Wolff Mitchell: he was the physician of a number of of people who were, um, were dying in that period. Um, and, uh, and then at that same period, skulls are ending up in his collection.

Whether he was just following standard practices in handling human remains, or because he just didn’t care… Morton rarely put any personal details in his so-called… “Catalog of skulls.” 

And what that means, is that it’s hard for us to know who these people once were. All we know, in many cases, is what their race was, or at least what race Morton labeled them.

But by cross-referencing notes from the Blockley Almshouse… with Morton’s “Catalog of skulls”…. Paul was able to identify 14 skulls. 

He was confident these 14 skulls belonged to Black men and women who died at the Almshouse. 

In theory…they weren’t enslaved when they died. But before that, who knows

Paul Wolff Mitchell: We don't know if they were born in Georgia or in Virginia or in North Carolina, We don't know, uh, if they were, um, enslaved at any point in their lifetime,

FP: And so Paul was like, if Penn’s committee was addressing what to do with enslaved people, why just focus on the skulls from Cuba? 

What about the skulls of Black Philadelphians?

Paul Wolff Mitchell: That was the big point. Beyond the specific numbers. That was the big point.

Christopher Woods: Well, you know, history might not repeat itself, but as, uh, Mark Twain has said, it does rhyme. Knowing what what the past is and what the past has to teach us is, is important for informing, um, our path forward.

FP: This is Christopher Woods. Chris became the director of the Penn Museum in April of 2021. And it certainly wasn’t the Morton collection that attracted him here 

Christopher Woods: my institute at Chicago was, uh, specifically devoted to the ancient Middle East. That's my my field, of course, but here the collection is is global in scope. The research is global in scope. So it was a real opportunity to expand my horizons.

[MUX IN]

FP: When Chris started his job… he was the first Black director of the Penn Museum, it was barely a year since George Floyd’s murder. Barely a year since the first demands were made to repatriate the Morton Collection.

Felix Poon: You know, it's not lost on me that you're the first black director of the Penn Museum. And this problem that you're dealing with, with was created essentially by racist white people to begin with. And I wonder how you feel about the fact that you, a black man, are the ones stuck with cleaning up their mess. Have you thought about this?

Christopher Woods: I don't I don't look at it as being stuck with it, but it gives me resolve to see these issues through…

[MUX SWELL]

FP: The pressure was on.

Chris was only on the job for three days, when an op-ed in the Philly Inquirer called once again for the museum to repatriate the collection.

It was written by an activist named Abdul Ali Muhammad. they just go by aAliy. And you’re gonna hear their name a LOT. 

That’s because, from the beginning, aAliy has  played a huge role in putting the pressure on Penn. They were the one at those that public meetings in 2019. 

CLIP: They could not believe that this was the case and asking, why is it that they didn't know this?

They’ve been quoted in the news. They started a change dot org petition.

And during that first week of Chris’s new job, they were among the dozens of protesters who gathered outside the museum holding signs that said  : return the remains, and abolish the collection.

[MUX SWELL AND OUT]

Like I said, the pressure was on. 

It was at this time that the Museum - under Chris’s guidance - decided to go all in. 

Instead of just repatriating the skulls of formerly enslaved men and women… they committed to repatriating the entire collection. All one thousand three hundred skulls.  

But that led to another question.

Which skulls would they start with?

Christopher Woods: Well, this was a decision that I made literally my on my first days on the job. Um, the individuals from Cuba, I knew that would be a very complicated process. Um, uh, given United States relations with Cuba. And then maybe these individuals really should probably go back to West Africa, but but where we don't know where they're from, it's a very complicated process. Um, it would be involve international agreements. There isn't a manual for doing this kind of work.

Um, on the other hand, the issue of the black Philadelphians, this was one of tremendous sensitivity here in Philadelphia. It was visceral, and it made sense to me to deal with, um, to, to address the black Philadelphians first

FP: Chris’s work started with a public apology from the Museum.  

Quote:  “It is time for these individuals to be returned to their ancestral communities, wherever possible, as a step toward atonement and repair.” Unquote.

The museum said it wanted fundamental community involvement. 

So Chris promised to form ANOTHER committee -  to understand how the local Black community wanted to see the Black Philadelphians from the Morton collection laid to rest. 

[mux]

In theory, aAliy and other activists thought this was a step in the right direction. 

Until that is, they found out that Penn was hiding another skeleton in its closet. 

Lyra Monteiro: Why? Why would anybody do that? How could anybody do that?

That’s after the break. 

[MUX SWELL AND OUT]

MIDROLL

FP: I said at the beginning of the episode, that this story can’t be told in the abstract. Context matters.

And what I mean by that, is that repatriation is an act of repair. It requires trust. Buy-in. 

And Penn’s relationship with the Black community in West Philadelphia hasn’t been that great. 

In the 1950s, the university pushed out the residents of a tight-knit black neighborhood to expand Penn’s footprint. 

People referred to the process as “Penn-trification.” 

And with their 20 plus billion dollar endowment, and their reputation as a premiere medical school - these things might impress future students, but they can divide the communities that actually surround the school. 

All of which is to say, Penn did not have everybody’s trust or buy-in when they formally apologized for the Morton Cranial Collection in 2021. 

Which is why just a week after the apology… It was a big deal that some additional news broke. 

[MUX IN]

News Anchor: Last week the University of Pennsylvania came under fire after it was revealed that the remains of children who were killed in the MOVE bombing have been sitting in a museum, for years.

To understand what this was all about, we have to go back to 1985. 

Back then, a controversial group named MOVE was headquartered in a home in a mostly Black middle-class neighborhood of West Philadelphia, just a 10 minute drive from the University. 

MOVE is a really hard group to categorize. At the time they were this kind of Black anti-technology back-to-the-land commune. All the members took the founder’s last name Africa. And they were armed.

Several MOVE members had been jailed after a shootout with police left one officer dead. And for over a year, they blasted their demands that they be released, with a bullhorn, through all hours of the day and night.

They also just yelled straight obscenities terrorizing the neighborhood.

Loudspeaker clip: All you greedy-ass motherfuckers. Get the fuck on down here, get the fuck on down here…

Their neighbors complained to the city. But nothing changed. And then…MOVE built a fortified bunker was erected on the roof, with “holes that were gun ports.” Don’t forget, this is in the middle of a residential street. Never mind that the property reportedly had these open compost piles with food scraps and human waste that attracted pests. Now there could be guns pointed down at you.

But NONE of this… is to excuse what happened  next… when the first Black mayor of Philadelphia, finally stepped in to do something.

…

On May 13th, 1985, the day after mother’s day, the city’s efforts to evict MOVE turned into a dramatic day-long stand-off. 

Reporter: Tremendous bursts of gunfire have rang out  in the area of the… [fade down and out]

Nearly 500 police officers in SWAT gear descended on the row house where MOVE was bunkered down.

When they refused to come out, police shot tear gas, and over ten-thousand rounds of ammunition.

Reporter: At city hall this afternoon Mayor Goode appeared publicly for the first time since the siege began. Goode said he’s committed to re moving MOVE from the structure.

Mayor: We intend to evict from the house, we intend to evacuate from the house, we intend to seize control of the house 

Reporters: How do you intend to do that?

Mayor: We will do it by any means necessary.

None of it got the MOVE members to budge.

So the police commissioner decided to drop a bomb on the roof from a helicopter. 

[CLIPS]

Reporter: There’s just been a huge explosion here. We don’t know what it means, but it just shook the whole place. Debris flew all over the place.

Ramona Africa: We heard the loud explosion. The house kind of shook.

This is Ramona Africa, a MOVE member who was in the house the day of the bombing, giving an interview to Democracy Now.

The explosion ignited a fire. Ramona says it got really hot in the house, and the smoke was getting thicker.

At first we thought it was tear gas. But as it got thicker it became clear that  this wasn’t tear gas, that this was something else.

and realized that our home was on fire. 

The police commissioner called off the fire department.

[MUX IN]

Hoping to drive out the MOVE members. “Let the fire burn,” he said.

The fire got out of control. It spread from the MOVE house… to the homes of the neighbors who were originally complaining about them. All of them were safely evacuated for the day.

But in the end, sixty-one homes burned to the ground. 

Only two MOVE members made it out alive. Six adults and five children were killed.

[MUX SWELL AND OUT]

We could spend a whole episode just talking about the MOVE bombing, and its traumatic legacy in Philadelphia.

But I’m gonna focus on what happened to the victim’s remains.

The medical examiner’s office was responsible for identifying the bodies. But almost nothing was left of them in the rubble… but their bones. And there were two sets of bones the lead examiner really struggled to identify.

So he enlisted a Penn Museum paleo-anthropologist to help. And according to him, the approximate ages of these two sets of bone fragments did not match any of the known victims.

In the end, the city of Philadelphia hired a special commission, with nationally renowned experts. They took over the investigation, and they determined, those two sets of remains belonged to two children in MOVE. 

14-year old Katricia (kuh-TREE-shuh), and 12-year old Delisha (duh-LEE-shuh).

After the official finding, the remains of the bombing victims were returned to their families….

[MUX IN]

Or at least that’s what the families thought.

The “remains” that Katricia’s family buried were a pair of her jeans and some of her soft tissue.

But her bones? Unbeknownst to their families, the medical examiner held onto all of Katricia’s bones, and some of Delisha’s.

Why? The medical examiner just didn’t buy the commission’s official findings. He was seemingly obsessed that they could someday prove this theory - that these bones belonged to someone else.

He even mailed them to the Smithsonian for another opinion. (they mailed them back) And from there, he gave them to that Penn Museum anthropologist, who reportedly stored them… in a cabinet… in his office.

…

Fast forward more than 3 decades. That Penn Museum anthropologist has long since left Penn. And those MOVE bombing remains… they turn up again… out of all places… in an online class video.

Lyra Monteiro: there was a lot of obviously extreme distress upon learning that these children's remains were in the museum, that they'd been used in a Coursera video and all of these things. And a lot of people were asking, why, right? How can we make sense of this? Um, how why would anybody do that? How could anybody do that?

FP: This is Lyra Monteiro. She’s an anthropological archaeologist - and another vocal critic of the Penn Museum.

Lyra Monteiro: And at the same time, frankly, a lot of people who weren't from Philly were also learning for the first time about the move bombing, which is also a big oh my God, why, how could anybody do you know, how could a city do this?

Keep in mind, these were children who still had living family members that remember them—mothers, a brother, a sister. 

And they had no idea that they were being used as educational props at the Penn Museum.

[MUX OUT]

Janet Monge was the curator in charge of human remains at the museum, and she was also the instructor who taught the class.

According to Janet, this was still a cold case, these MOVE bones hadn’t been successfully identified yet.

To her, they were appropriate for the class, because the class was about restoring “lost personhood.” 

But that is not how the public saw it when a freelance reporter who used to work for the Penn Museum, broke the news.

No justice! No peace!

News Reporter: In the shadow of the Penn Museum tonight, voices of anger and frustration.

Family member: They lack humanity. They have no respect for us living or dead.

Mike Africa Jr: so we’re out here today right now, to say we want these [bleeped] to be held accountable to what they did to our family. 

Reporter: The protestors then marched to the office of Penn’s president. The Penn Museum told NBC10 that reuniting the remains with MOVE family members is our goal. Williams Director Chris Woods has personally reached out to the Africa Family, and their ongoing conversations will help us understand the family’s wishes as we work towards a respectful resolution.

[mux/beat/tone shift]

There is so SO much we could get into here. What’s happened since this revelation has been the subject of extensive reports by three different law firms, and a very thorough investigation by the New York Times. 

But these reports… Let me just say that they focus mostly on individuals: like the original medical examiner and the Penn anthropologist; and Janet Monge - who used the remains in her class. 

But what they don’t address is the academic culture that allowed these remains to be kept in a museum for so long in the first place. 

A culture of ownership… where scientists believe they have ultimate authority over remains that they think are “important.” 

These bones - kept in boxes, displayed as props, used in videos - some say that they’re a continuation of those old 19th century ideas… where human remains are just objects for science.

There are lots of stories that speak to this mindset.

For years, a box in Penn museum storage contained a set of human remains with no identifying documentation whatsoever. 

And then in 2014, an effort to digitize records revealed that it was a 6,000 year old skeleton dug up by archeologists in Iraq in the 1920s.

All this to say, science has not traditionally treated bones with much reverence.

[mux]

Janet Monge - the woman who used the MOVE remains in her class as educational props - she was let go. 

She’s now suing the university, media outlets, and virtually all of the people featured in this episode for defamation.

As for the Penn Museum, they apologized for keeping the remains - and handed them back over to MOVE.  

But over the next couple of years - new informa tion has continued to cast doubt on whether the issue is really closed.

aAliy Muhammad: Janet Monge lied to us about the bones she kept. The University of Penn Director of Penn Museum Christopher Woods and the Tucker Law Group allowed that lie to persist

[DUCK UNDER AND OUT]

This is aAliy speaking at a press conference outside the museum last year. Lyra Monteiro was there too, and when aAliy finished speaking, the two of them entered the museum, and they confronted Director Chris Woods.

They showed him what they said was photographic evidence of ADDITIONAL M OVE remains that hadn’t been returned, taken from the museum’s old defunct Flickr site.

Lyra Monteiro: and his response was, how do I know those are MOVE remains? All I see is Janet with a bunch of bones.

But the official position from the museum…is that they don't have any more remains from the MOVE bombing. Here’s Chris.

Lyra Monteiro: Those remains remained here far far far too long. And we returned all known MOVE remains to the Africa family. MOVE remains should not be in the museum. And to our knowledge, they aren’t.

[MUX TRANSITION]

 So we started this episode talking about the Morton collection. Remember that? The one that Samuel Morton filled with lead shot and seeds to try to prove his racist theories? And that Chris Woods had promised to repatriate after pressure from the public? 

So what, if anything, did the MOVE remains have to do with the Morton Cranial Collection?

Felix Poon: do you see the move remains and the Morton remains to be connected issues?

Christopher Woods: No, they're not connected issues.

FP: Chris says that the only thing connecting them was that they both happened to be housed within the museum. But he says, even that fact is incidental.

Christopher Woods: The MOVE remains were never part of the collection. These were researchers in the 1980s who, um, uh, were trying to identify these individuals and who were working on behalf of the city, um, independent of the museum, independent of the university, to help identify these individuals.

[MUX SWELL AND OUT]

But like I said - context matters. 

And to some in the local community, these issues are DEFINITELY connected. 

The handling of the MOVE remains was a huge erosion of trust.

If Chris CAN’T be trusted with the remains of children from the MOVE bombing

… how can he be trusted with the repatriation of the Morton Cranial Collection? 

Lyra Monteiro: This is not the work that the museum has a right to do. 

…

Trust in our scientific institutions, like museums, and universities—it’s shifting. In BIG ways.

Lyra Monteiro: We're talking about a problem that's created by white supremacy by colonialism over centuries and generations.

As a society, we’ve entrusted scientists to steward our questions about how to move forward. But should we?

Lyra Monteiro: For people who are alive now, who've made their career and made a living out of the exploitation of other people's ancestors, to even think that they get to have a say in what happens. To me, that's really fucked up.

[MUX IN]

FP: That’s next time, in our final episode, of What Remains.

CREDITS

FP: If you want to learn more about the MOVE bombing, and the subsequent handling of the MOVE remains, check out our show notes. We’ve put links there to the NY Times investigation and other reports, as well as additional reading about the Penn and Slavery Project, and the Morton Cranial Collection.

Archival tape from the MOVE bombing in this episode was from the documentary, “Let the Fire Burn.” And from Democracy Now!

FP: This episode was reported and produced by me, Felix Poon. It was edited by Taylor Quimby, with additional editing help from Rebecca Lavoie, Nate Hegyi, Katie Colaneri, Jason Moon, Daniela Allee, Todd Bookman Justine Paradis, Marina Henke, and Kate Dario.

Nate Hegyi is the host of Outside/In. Taylor Quimby is our executive producer. Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio.

Special thanks to Buffy Gorilla.

FP: Music in this episode is from Lennon Hutton, and Blue Dot Sessions. The theme music for the What Remains mini-series is by Lennon Hutton.

Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.