What Remains, Part 2: In Memoriam
A scholar and an activist make an uncompromising ultimatum. A forgotten burial ground is discovered under the streets of New York City. In Philadelphia, two groups fight over the definition of “descendant community.”
Featuring Michael Blakey, Lyra Monteiro, Chris Woods, aAliy Muhammad, Wendell Mapson, Sacharja Cunningham, Jazmin Benton, Amrah Salomon, and Aja Lans.
ADDITIONAL MATERIALS
Archival tape of protests for the African Burial Ground came from the documentary The African Burial Ground: An American Discovery (1994).
Learn more about the African Burial Ground National Monument.
A recently published report, co-authored by bioarchaeologist Michael Blakey for the American Anthropological Association, recommends that research involving the handling of ancestral remains must include collaboration with descendant communities.
Learn more about Finding Ceremony, the repatriation organization started by aAliy Muhammad and Lyra Monteiro.
Read the Penn Museum’s statement about the Morton Cranial Collection and the 19 Black Philadelphians they interred at Eden Cemetery in early 2024.
SUPPORT
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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.
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.
Taylor Quimby: A quick heads up for listeners, there are some swears in this episode.
Felix Poon: Previously, on What Remains.
Paul Wolff Mitchell: 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.
Protestors: No justice! No peace! No justice! No peace!
Felix Poon: This problem was created 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
Molly Zuckerman: Burying people to eliminate discussion about what should happen with them is not a good answer.
Aja Lans: I think we're all looking at Penn Museum and just hoping to not end up in a situation like that.
Felix Poon: To really understand what happened at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, I have to use a term you’re gonna hear again and again.
“Descendant community.”
And to truly understand what that means - we’re gonna have to go back in time…
[TV NEWS JINGLE]
From Fox 5! This is the 10 o’clock news
News Anchor: It’s a graveyard right in the heart of downtown, and it’s already surprising some historians. Jeff Wiser has more in this exclusive report.
Felix Poon: New York City. 1991.
The federal government is building a new office building in downtown Manhattan. And when they start digging, they uncover human skeletons.
Jeff Wiser: While government officials have withheld comment, and have sealed the site from t he public, Fox News has learned that archaeologists have discovered a historic site at this location.
[MUX IN WHILE ARCHIVAL FADES OUT]
Felix Poon: On an old 1755 map of Manhattan, this spot was labeled the “Negro Burial Grounds.” It was a cemetery where enslaved Africans buried thousands of their dead.
But by the late 1700s, it was no longer in use. The city covered it in 25 feet of soil. And then they forgot about it.
The federal agency that’s in charge of the new building, they kept digging… and they dug up hundreds more graves in the process.
A lot of Black New Yorkers? Were not happy with this.
Adunni Oshupa Tabasi: You should not even be in charge to begin with, but it’s the same old 200 year old biz, of the Aryan male being in charge of the African.
Felix Poon: The tape I’m playing here by the way, it’s from a 1994 documentary called The African Burial Ground: An American Discovery.
David Paterson: We are compelled by history to defend the rights of our fore parents to stay right where they were buried.
If that is not the case, let me suggest that the sons and daughters of the people buried there will boycott and picket that site, and it’ll be a lot more expensive than it is now.
[applause]
[DUCK ARCHIVAL UNDER]
Felix Poon: A coalition of local politicians, religious leaders, and everyday community members came together. They organized vigils, protests, and meetings.
And to be clear, they didn’t all want the same things.
But they rallied around a shared sentiment that this wasn’t just a political issue. This was personal.
Noel Pointer: There’s a slogan that seems to be going around the community right now which says: Some of them bones is my mothers bones come together for to rise and shine. Some of them bones is my fathers bones, and some of them bones is mine.
[MUX OUT – ARCHIVAL SINGING IN]
Felix Poon: Construction finally halted about a year after the discovery of the burial ground. Digging stopped. The coalition had won.
[ARCHIVAL SINGING]
But what about the hundreds of skeletons that had already been taken out of the soil? Should they be immediately reburied? Or should they be studied?
And most importantly…who decides?
Felix Poon: After halting construction, the federal government transferred the burial ground remains to a named Michael Blakey.
And once you get to know Michael a bit, you can see why.
Felix Poon: I read up that you were already studying dental pathology and mass masticatory musculature at the age of 15.v
Michael Blakey: Well. I think it's pretty common for children to be fascinated by by dinosaurs and archeology.
Felix Poon: This is Michael.
For him, digging in the dirt was another way of digging into his own past.
Michael Blakey: My mother's people are Nanticoke Moors. They are a mixed native or indigenous people of Delaware. And my great Uncle Kermit was a real collector, and so I'd love to go out with him to the corn fields and soybean fields to collect arrowheads, you know, projectile points and pottery. And this is something the older people did sometimes on weekends, and we were exploring our own history in that way.
[mux beat]
Felix Poon: By the time the African Burial Ground was discovered in 1991, Michael was a professor at Howard University, and he understood what a huge responsibility it was to be given these remains.
Michael Blakey: the dilemma with regard to human remains. Is that of the human need to know. And the human need for dignity.
Felix Poon: As an archaeologist, Michael was excited to research the African Burial Ground bones - to unlock buried chapters of American history.
But he wanted to treat the remains differently from how his White colleagues had typically treated remains
Michael Blakey: There's been a long tradition in Western science of objectification, and it's been applied more. Um, to people of color.
Felix Poon: The answer, from a theoretical standpoint, was simple.
Michael Blakey: informed consent. Is the fundamental ethical principle that applies that reduces the possibility of harm. Which is key. So if there is informed consent, then research can go forward.
Felix Poon: But in a case like this - with the African Burial Ground, where we can’t trace the next of kin - who, if anybody, can give permission to study these remains?
Michael Blakey: the people who are out in the streets in New York protesting, holding prayer vigils. These were mainly African Americans. And I needed a term that related to their standing their rights of stewardship over their ancestral remains.
Felix Poon: To Michael - this group of Black people who claimed these bones as their ancestors - they were the descendants, whether they had direct lineage or not.
So he called them the “descendant community.”
Michael Blakey: So we held forums downtown and in Harlem. Over the course of a year. To ascertain the kinds of questions that that descendant community … might allow us to pursue.
Felix Poon: Michael’s team identified a handful of questions from these meetings.
Essentially, they wanted to know the story of their ancestors…
Michael Blakey: and their humanity that they were not just cattle, they were human beings who in every day, in every way, struggled against slavery.
[MUX SWELL]
Felix Poon: Lab analysis of the bones was completed around 2004, more than a decade after they were first found. And Michael’s research was shared with the descendant community that gave him permission in the first place—there were reports, public presentations, and a visitor center that opened at the site with exhibits about the cemetery, and the role enslaved Black people played in building New York.
as for the remains? They were given back… and the descendant community celebrated their return.
They were reburied at the original site, which was designated both a national historic landmark, and, a national monument. Maya Angelou spoke at the dedication ceremony.
Maya Angelou: It is imperative that each of us knows that we own this country. Because we’ve already been paid for.
Felix Poon: I don’t want to paint this as an easy process, or pretend there weren’t disagreements.
But… Since Michael’s work on the African burial ground, the concept of descendant communities has helped create a new standard of ethical science.
The American Anthropological Association is potentially changing their ethics policies along these lines.
In this framing, the role that scientists play is to provide a service, not for the museums or institutions that hire them. But for their client: a self-selected self-organized group, with open membership to those identifying as part of the descendant community.
[MUX IN]
Michael Blakey: we've found that the African Burial Ground is maybe one of the certainly one of the best examples, if not the best example of how ethical bioarchaeology can go forward. And we are saying it must go forward in that ethical way in the future.
Michael Blakey: What happened at the Penn Museum is very different from that.
[MUX]
<<NUTGRAPH>>
Felix Poon: I’m Felix Poon. And this… is What Remains – a special series from Outside/In.
In the last episode, we took you to Philadelphia - home of the Penn Museum… which has promised to repatriate the one thousand three hundred human skulls in the controversial Morton Cranial Collection.
This past January, the first skulls to be repatriated were interred in a cemetery in the outskirts of Philadelphia.
This could have been a powerful precedent for museums working to give back human remains.
But instead, it was a combative process, that left many in Philadelphia and beyond, deeply unsatisfied.
Lyra Monteiro: The same institutions that that have caused the harm can't. Be part of the healing.
Felix Poon: Today - we tell you the story of how it happened.
Amrah Salomon: …It was obvious to us that due diligence was not being done by the museum.
Felix Poon: What should the process of repatriation look like? Who qualifies as a descendant? And who gets to lead the process?
Chris Woods: They’re not in the museum. They're no longer in the museum storerooms. And I'm I'm happy with that decision. I know it's the right and ethical thing to do.
Felix Poon: This is Part Two: In Memoriam
<<PRE-ROLL BREAK>>
Felix Poon: Lyra Monteiro can be a hard person to define. She was trained as an archeologist at Brown university, but…
Lyra Monteiro: I actually don't dig anymore. I'm an archeologist who doesn't dig.
Felix Poon: Until recently she taught history at Rutgers…classes like race and gender in american film…. and “specific storytelling and community engagement.”
Lyra Monteiro: I am definitely an undisciplined scholar.
Lyra Monteiro: I work on what makes sense for me to be working on
[MUX IN]
Felix Poon: But early in her career, Lyra took a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania… where she often found herself at the Penn museum.
Lyra Monteiro: And one day when I was there I, entirely by accident. I found myself in the middle of an exhibit of skulls from Morton's collection.
Felix Poon: Five skulls in this exhibit were lined up vertically, representing Samuel Morton’s five races…
With the lowest race at the bottom and the top race at the top.
Felix Poon: to illustrate Morton’s bogus theories of scientific racism.
Lyra Monteiro: I was shocked that it was on display.
Lyra Monteiro: And then even worse, the display itself was structured…to teach people what Morton thought.
Felix Poon: To be clear, the exhibit explained that it was junk science.
Lyra Monteiro: the conceit was that, hey, we're telling people about how bad it is, but in the process, they're actually just kind of telling people that and actually reinforcing it
[mux swell]
Lyra Monteiro: nobody else around seemed to think it was a problem. And, um, and that was something that I know really troubled me and I, and I felt like something needed to happen, something needed to be done about it. But I didn't know what to do.
And, you know, this was 2014. This was before a lot of conversations related to heritage and racism were really happening.
[MUX SWELL AND OUT]
Felix Poon: That was over 10 years ago. And a LOT has changed. The Morton Cranial Collection is no longer on display.
And Lyra has become one of the most vocal critics of the Penn Museum.
The museum has vowed to repatriate the remains in the collection - and she has a strong opinion about how it should be done.
Lyra Monteiro: It's going to be messy. There isn't a simple answer. There isn't a perfect answer. But the answer to me is absolutely that descendants get to decide. Scholars should shut the fuck up.
[mux swell and fade]
Felix Poon: There are some similarities between the Morton Cranial Collection, and the remains dug up at the African Burial Ground in the 1990s.
First of all, the remains are old. Some of them date back almost 200 years.
And there’s very little information about the people they once belonged to.
Discovering their identities – nevermind finding direct descendents – it could be impossible for many, if not most of the skulls in the collection.
But what makes the Morton Collection more complicated…is where the remains are from.
Because the African Burial Ground skeletons were remains of Black people that were found in one place New York City.
The Morton skulls on the other hand, are from people of all sorts of backgrounds, from all over the place.
Lyra Monteiro: it's so much bigger than what people understand it to be. Um, the 1300 skulls are from literally all over the world.
[MUX IN]
Felix Poon: To use Michael Blakey’s model here would mean multiple descendant communities.
An Australian descendant community for Australian skulls.
A Black descendant community for the Black skulls.
And Lyra. for example, might be in a South Asian descendant community.
Lyra Monteiro: So my father's family is from India, and a roughly 50 of the crania in the collection are from South Asia.
Felix Poon: And IN THIS MODEL, it would be all of these communities of self-identifying descendants who would have final say over their community’s ancestors and how they want to lay them to rest.
Lyra Monteiro: This is not the work that the museum has a right to do.
Lyra Monteiro: We're talking about a problem that's created by white supremacy by colonialism over centuries and generations. And 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 SWELL AND OUT]
Felix Poon: Lyra wasn’t involved yet back in 2021, when the Penn Museum announced their intention to repatriate the one thousand three hundred skulls in the Morton Cranial Collection.
But, it did seem like the museum was on track to follow aspects of Michael Blakey’s descendant community model.
Like, they said they wanted to proceed with the “utmost care and diligence”, and they said they would seek “community consultation at every stage.”
To divide up the process, Director Chris Woods wanted to start with the dozen or so remains that researchers had identified as belonging most likely to Black Philadelphians.
So he formed a community advisory group.
It included local Black leaders from West Philadelphia: pastors, an imam. Members of community non-profits, and… a prominent critic of the Penn Museum.
And Chris says there was pretty clear consensus on what to do with the Black Philadelphians in the Morton Collection.
Christopher Woods: I will tell you that from our very first meeting, there was unanimity that these individuals should be laid to rest as soon as possible.
and that these individuals, after 200 years should wait no longer. And this was, um, the group was unanimous on this point from the very beginning.
Felix Poon: I'm sorry. I just want to clarify that when you say unanimous, was it clear from every member that they're like, yes, I agree with this, or was it more like any objections? And no one says anything which might not know?
Christopher Woods: No, it was clear everyone had voiced their support, even, um, some of the critics that were part of that group, the issues that came up next where people did have minor disagreements were one where we where should we do this?
But on the question of should these individuals be laid to rest? Um, now, as soon as possible. There was it was unanimous and there were no disagreements. And people certainly had the opportunity to to voice any disagreements. Yeah.
Felix Poon: Uh, does that unanimity include, um, Ali Muhammad?
Christopher Woods: It does.
Felix Poon: Okay.
Christopher Woods: Certainly. Does
aAliy Muhammad: I would say, and this is on record, that Christopher Woods is, uh, someone who lies.
Felix Poon: This is West Philadelphia activist Abdul aAliy Muhammad. They go by aAliy. And aAliy has been one of the museum’s fiercest critics.
For years they protested, wrote op-eds in the Philly Inquirer, and pushed for the repatriation of The Morton Collection.
They were invited to be part of the advisory group, and aAliy… felt pretty unsatisfied with it, right off the bat.
aAliy Muhammad: Christopher Wood's definition of community is quite different than I believe ours is. And my definition, which is people actually rooted in the community doing the work.
Felix Poon: There are a number of disagreements here. But I’m gonna focus on a few big ones.
First.
While aAliy thought this should’ve been the beginning of a process… to identify and give agency to a descendent community… Chris Woods basically said this was it, this “advisory group” WAS the local descendent community.
Christopher Woods: these were major figures in West Philadelphia with deep, deep roots in this community. And this is the descendant community. We pick these individuals to be part of this because they represented the descendant community.
Felix Poon: Again, Lyra wasn’t involved yet. But by choosing its members – Lyra says Penn was engaging in a form of theater - making a show of community support that wasn’t actually there.
Lyra Monteiro: Museums don't get to decide who is the descendant community. That's not how the concept of descendant community, as it has been used since the African burial ground in, in the 1990s. That's not how that works. It’s not about appointing people who you see as community leaders, to rubber stamp a thing.
aAliy Muhammad: so people haven't really been asking him tough questions about that. Um, look at the community group that Penn has assembled. Most of them work for Penn or have an affiliation with Penn or close ties to Penn.
Felix Poon: That’s another thing.
A Penn Museum report had recommended they develop a transparent process for repatriation.
But the identities of the advisory group members… were kept secret.
And According to documents we obtained, 5 of the 12 members were in fact Penn faculty and staff.
Chris responded to each of these criticisms.
Christopher Woods: we're stewards of this collection.
Felix Poon: (The museum does legally own the Morton skulls)
Christopher Woods: And so it's natural that you're going to have some Penn affiliates as part of that.
Felix Poon: As for the secrecy of who was in the group?
Christopher Woods: We didn't make the names of this group public because…the situation on social media was and is continues, continues to be very ugly. We didn't want these people doxed or harassed.
Felix Poon: Chris, in turn, had a criticism of his own for aAliy.
Christopher Woods: I will add that after that first meeting, um, Abdul Ali didn't bother to come to another meeting, didn't resign from the group. Um, just never showed up at another meeting.
Felix Poon: I asked aAliy about this. They said they couldn’t make the second meeting because they were traveling outside the U.S
And when they talked to other members of the group, aAliy said it was clear they were, quote, “infatuated by Penn’s power, and not at all truly concerned with the ancestors Penn continues desecrating.”
So aAliy stopped going entirely.
I did manage to speak to another member of the community advisory group. His name is Wendell Mapson. And he’s the pastor of the 2nd oldest African American Baptist Church in PA.
[MUX OUT]
Wendell Mapson: So I never felt like there was an attempt to silence voices that didn’t agree. And I wouldn't have been a part of of a group where I felt I was just rubber stamping, uh, a decision that already been made by the university. I wouldn't I wouldn't have been a part of that.
Felix Poon: He said the decision wasn’t unanimous - but that there was a quote “overwhelming majority.”
Wendell Mapson: what makes issues like that complex is who represents the community. Right. Um, you know, and, and it's easy to say, well, if you don't agree with with me, then you don't represent the community.
There was spirited discussion, uh, uh, on the committee. Um, but there was also this consensus that we needed to come together to do something rather than just to, um, complain about a past wrong. Um, let's move forward and, and deal with it, and do something.
[MUX IN]
Felix Poon: So according to Wendell it wasn’t unanimous like Chris said. But it wasn’t a rubber stamping process like aAliy and Lyra said.
Anyway, If all of this is sounding like a lot of “he said, they said”, you’re right.
There were minutes taken at these meetings, but the Penn Museum declined to share them with us.
We submitted a public record request for them, but haven’t received a response yet.
But a source on background did give me the minutes from a couple meetings,
They’re not very detailed. There’s no mention of formal votes. And it’s not always clear who’s making what points.
There IS a line though, in the first meeting minutes, that says “Recommendation and Discussion: turn over the remains to a community member, and not be organized by the University.”
Whatever the case may be, Chris’s take away from that first meeting was agreement to bury the Black Philadelphian skulls, as soon as possible.
Christopher Woods: You know, people could say universities and museums all the time will say, you know, let's not do anything now. We're going to do some more research and you kick the can down the road, and it's tantamount to doing nothing. Right. We weren't willing to do that. It would have been easy to say like, well, let's do some more research. We're going to look into it. Let me get back to you in a couple of years about this. We weren't willing to do this because that's not what our community members wanted.
Felix Poon: And so the museum moved forward, to bury the remains.
<<MID-ROLL BREAK 1>>
Felix Poon: A few months after aAliy stopped going to the Advisory Group, Lyra sent them a DM on Twitter.
She was working on a paper about Penn’s handling of the Morton Collection - as well as the MOVE remains, a controversy we talked about in the last episode.
They realized that they were on the same page… that it should be descendant communities that decide how to repatriate the skulls from the Morton Cranial Collection.
And then, in 2022, they found out the Museum was moving forward.
Lyra Monteiro: So in May of 2022, the museum submitted a petition to Orphan's Court with a request to be able to bury at least 13 black Philadelphians.
Felix Poon: At least 13. So kind of vague.
Lyra Monteiro: Kind of vague. Concerningly vague.
Felix Poon: This again, is Lyra Monteiro.
The Orphans’ Court by the way is a legal authority that rules on things like estates (es-STATES), wills, guardianship over minors.
And apparently, hundred year old skulls.
aAliy - who hadn’t been attending the advisory group meetings anymore, was surprised to find their name on the petition.
[mux]
Felix Poon: For alllll the reasons I mentioned earlier, aAliy and Lyra did NOT believe this was a legitimate descendent community.
So they consulted with a lawyer, and filed an alternative proposal to the court. And it was BOLD.
—instead of burying the Black Philadelphians, their proposal was for Penn to hand the entire Morton Collection over to them.
Together, aAliy and Lyra would start a new independent organization called… “Finding… Ceremony."
They said Finding Ceremony would do a thorough inventory of the collection’s 1,300 skulls.
And then they would convene multiple descendant communities… Not just for the Black Philadelphians, but eventually for all of the peoples and places from which these remains were taken.
The proposal acknowledged that this work would take decades. They would need a team of experts and staff. It would be expensive.
And – they said Penn COULD NOT have a role.
Lyra Monteiro: I mean the same institutions that that have caused the harm can't. Be part of the healing. They can't.
Felix Poon: The ONLY role Penn could have, they said, was to pay for it. All of it. As reparations for the harm they’ve done.
[MUX SWELL]
Christopher Woods: I’m glad you mentioned their court filing, because there's a monetary aspect to this, right?
Felix Poon: This is Penn Museum director Chris Woods again.
Christopher Woods: What they're requesting is that we turn over the entire Morton collection to them, that we pay them salaries, you know, for decades that we give them per diems, provide research funds, even a snack fund. So, you know, this is a very different agenda.
Felix Poon: There was a request for.
Christopher Woods: Snacks you should look at. Look at their filing before the court. There's I must mention of a snack fund. So no look, look through it. It's there. So really this is a very different agenda.
[MUX OUT]
Felix Poon: So…there’s no mention of a quote “snack fund” in the proposal. There is a note in the budget about refreshments for descendant community meetings, and per diems for conferences.
In other words, it’s a budget.
But…a budgent with an unspecified, and very expensive pricetag.
Lyra Monteiro: And penn absolutely has the resources for that. You know, their their endowment is over $20 billion. They can pay for what they want to pay for. Um, and part of reparations work generally is grounded in a recognition that Penn only has that money because of the exploitation of black and brown people in the United States and around the world for hundreds of years.
[MUX]
Felix Poon: In the end, the court approved Penn’s petition. They ordered them to bury the remains within a year.
And they dismissed aAliy and Lyra’s proposal for Finding Ceremony.
So what did they do next?
They started it anyway.
More on THAT after a break.
<<MIDROLL BREAK 2>>
Felix Poon: In May of 2023, aAliy and Lyra convened a gathering at Malcolm X Park, in Philadelphia.
There’s a video of them, sitting at a picnic table, talking through a PA. It’s a little distracting because you can hear kids playing nearby.
[AMBI]
Felix Poon: Because of the angle, you can’t see how many people they’re talking to, but Lyra says maybe a few dozen people showed up.
aAliy: So I put it in the context of the question of reparations and that Penn owes reparations for doing harm and continuing to do harm today to Black folks.
Felix Poon: They were there to kick off the process they believed Penn should have done from the beginning – to form, in their eyes a legitimate descendant community of Black Philadelphians.
Sacharja Cunningham: I felt called to join, and I was also really moved by what I was hearing. And Ali made a clear call to black Philadelphians in the local community to join the Black Philadelphians descendent community group.
Felix Poon: This is Sacharja Cunningham.
Jazmin Benton: it felt like the place that I needed to be at that time.
Felix Poon: And this is Jazmin Benton, who joined a little later after seeing social media posts.
Jazmin Benton: and it was really good to be in a space where, where we did not have to explain what the problem was.
Felix Poon: Neither of them were born and raised in Philly, but they felt like it was their responsibility to be involved.
We were already all on that same page that this is a problem, and now we're talking about what we're going to do.
Felix Poon: The newly formed descendant community of Black Philadelphians – didn’t have legal authority over the remains themselves.
They had some information about which remains Penn was planning to bury. But they wanted to know more.
So Lyra convened a team of volunteers willing to research whatever the descendant community wanted to know. One of those volunteers is Amrah Salomon.
Amrah Salomon: I'm an assistant professor of English, actually, at University of California, Santa Barbara
Felix Poon: The descendent group wanted to know more about the people Penn was planning to bury… including John Voorhees, the only named individual in the group Penn was repatriating .
Penn’s initial research report didn’t say much.
Only that he was quote “a Mulatto porter, born in Chester county Pennsylvania, and died of consumption in the Blockley Hospital”
(“Consumption” by the way, was another name for tuberculosis back in the day.)
So Amrah and the rest of the Finding Ceremony research team got to work.
They cross referenced Morton’s notes with archival records.
Amrah Salomon: death certificates, hospital records
Felix Poon: Genealogical databases.
Amrah Salomon: can we find that person in the census records? Can we find them in church records?
Felix Poon: They checked for alternative spellings of his name.
Amrah Salomon: this is your, you know, archival history Research 101 class you would take as a grad student your first year.
You would do these things right.
Felix Poon: They also looked at records from the almshouse where Voorhees died.
Amrah Salomon: And the almshouse had a very detailed interview they'd done with him.
Felix Poon: Eventually this led to a big discovery.
They learned that Voorhees worked on a farm. That he had a wife and a child. And that he described his mother as an Indigenous woman.
Amrah Salomon: most likely Lenape.
Felix Poon: This isn’t just an interesting side note, that Voorhees was mixed race.
This was a big revelation, because it meant Voorhees’ remains were legally protected by NAGPRA—the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
The Penn Museum could be violating federal law if they buried him.
Amrah Salomon: And so it was obvious to us that due diligence was not being done by the museum.
[MUX SWELL AND OUT]
Felix Poon: In a last ditch effort to stop the Penn Museum, the Black Philadelphian Descendant Community Group revealed the information they had about John Voorhees’ Native ancestry, and that Penn could be in violation of federal law if they buried him.
But… it didn’t work.
The Museum simply removed John Voorhees skull from the group, and set it aside to go through the legally mandated NAGPRA process.
And then, on January 22nd, 2024… they quietly interred the rest of the skulls—19 Black Philadelphians, in Eden cemetery, just outside of Philadelphia.
A week and a half later, on February 3rd, Penn held a public interfaith service at the Penn Museum.
Penn provost John Jackson Jr spoke behind a lecturn.
John Jackson Jr.: The remains. These people. Human beings. Our brothers, our sisters. Anonymized. Dehumanized, should never have been on display. For that, on behalf of the entire university
please accept my most sincere regrets and deepest apologies.
Felix Poon: Penn security stood at the gates of the museum, and denied Lyra entry. aAliy wasn’t there.
Inside, Christopher Woods took the mic.
Chris Woods: We do not know the names of the 19 Philadelphians we commemorate today. Morton did not record them.
It is my sincere hope that continued research will be successful in restoring the identity of at least some Philadelphians in the Morton collection. It will be a very happy day when we can return some of these fellow citizens to their descendants.
Felix Poon: When I first started reporting this story, a lot of this drama seemed like a fight between two camps: Chris and the Penn Museum, and Lyra and aAliy.
And from the outside, it wasn’t clear who had the moral high ground.
I struggled initially to understand why burying these remains would be considered a bad thing. I thought:... Isn’t that what repatriation is? Getting them out of the museum, and laying them to rest in a cemetery?
And there were other optics that were confusing too. Like, the fact that Lyra’s not from Philly. For most of this saga Lyra was a professor working at Rutgers in New Jersey. And she’s South Asian American, not Black.
Even though there are dozens of South Asian skulls in the Morton collection, this whole conflict over the Black Philadelphians was a story with so much local context, about who decides what happens to these Black ancestors - it wasn’t clear at first what her role was in all of this. And Penn Museum director Chris Woods articulated this.
Christopher Woods: should a, a professor from new Jersey who lives in New York, should that person's agenda take precedence over the black Philadelphians who wanted to see this through? I mean, this is the type of elitism and colonialism that we're fighting against, right? That outsiders dictating what should be done.
Felix Poon: my understanding is also there has been a, an actual descendant community formed um, of of uh, Philadelphian residents. In retrospect, knowing that there was maybe some interest in a more open approach, do you do you think the museum should have used that instead? And you wouldn't be in under so much fire in the press?
Christopher Woods: Well, I would say I'm under fire by two people.
Christopher Woods: You know, we made public notice of of what our our plans for the Morton Collection and the Black Philadelphians some two and a half years ago when we published public notice in those two and a half years, I've not received one email, one letter, one phone call, one request for a meeting from a member of the local African American community saying, hey, we want to know what you're doing. Wait, stop. So, you know, we're looking at a very, very small group of people.
Felix Poon: I mean…
This is objectively untrue. At the very least, aAliy is a member of the local African American community who’s definitely said, “hey, we want to know what you’re doing. Wait, stop.”
Then there’s Sacharja and Jazmin, along with the rest of the Black Philadelphian Descendant Community Group. Sure, they might not be as vocal as aAliy and Lyra, but members have spoken up in the local media.
Even in academic circles, people are talking.
Aja Lans: we're all looking at Penn Museum and just hoping to not end up in a situation like that.
Felix Poon: This is Aja Lans, the Johns Hopkins bioarcheologist we spoke to in the prologue episode.
Aja Lans: which is actually pretty easily avoidable if you would just take your time and be willing to listen to people whose opinions differ from your own.
Felix Poon: Even Michael Blakey, who shepherded the African Burial Ground process in the 1990s, says Penn missed the mark.
Michael Blakey: It appears that leaders were selected….
It was expedited. And the instead of having a public consensus, growing understanding of a, you know, an inclusive group of, uh, descendants. In the city and beyond. There was. Um, conflict with many African Americans in the city.
Felix Poon: And to Lyra and aAliy, Chris is the outsider - a museum director from Chicago who is shoehorning his definition of community into the process.
Lyra Monteiro: He just showed up from Chicago in 2021. to later in, you know, months after he got there, pick and choose who he believes to be the leaders of a the community and put them onto this group. But the whole concept between behind descendant community is self-identification.
Felix Poon: You could say that Lyra and aAliy are uncompromising. You can disagree with their rhetoric.
But you can’t say they’re alone.
aAliy Muhammad: Yes, I might, I might be one of the loudest, but I'm not the only person. And I'm not the only person that constitutes the black Philadelphians Descendant community group
Felix Poon: Placing these remains in Eden Cemetery. This was the end of a chapter.
But it was barely the beginning of something sooo much more vast.
Because it took years just to inter these 19 skulls out of a total of one thousand three hundred in the Morton Cranial collection.
The rest of them are still in storage back at the Penn Museum.
The museum HAS hired a new full-time anthropologist to lead this repatriation work, she’s someone who worked with Michael Blakey on the African Burial Ground project in the 90s.
But… it’s not clear yet if the museum will really dedicate the resources to do right by these remains.
Because Lyra and aAliy’s proposal—that Penn hand over the entire collection? That may have been politically unrealistic.
But at least the scope they described - teams of researchers, huge sums of money, and decades of work, that’s actually what it might take.
And in the end, there’s no guarantee we even identify the right descendant community for each individual.
Even with the 19 skulls Penn interred this past January - Lyra says you can’t guarantee all of them were even Black.
Archival records are spotty, and the forensic methods for identifying race just by looking at bones, they’re called estimations for a reason.
And that’s just at the Penn Museum. There are still human remains from unconsenting individuals all across this country—thirty thousand at The Smithsonian, twenty thousand at Harvard, 18 thousand at UC Berkeley.
If and when we repatriate them, how will we know we got it right?
[MUX IN]
Lyra Monteiro: This is not over, right? You know, the museum literally still owns the remains that are in the vaults. This isn’t over.
Felix Poon: One of the decisions Penn made in interring the 19 skulls of Black Philadelphians, is that instead of burying them, they put them in an above ground mausoleum.
In case any new research reveals more about their identities, then they can be easily removed.
Chris Woods: But they're not in the museum. They're no longer in the museum storerooms, and I don't think they belong here. And they're not here. And I'm I'm I'm happy with that decision.
I know it's the right and ethical thing to do.
Felix Poon: But to many… this is just proof… that the Black Philadelphians are not - really - at peace.
[MUX SWELL]
<<CREDITS>>
Felix Poon: If you wanna learn more about the African Burial Ground, and Michael Blakey’s research, check out the links in our show notes.
And let us know what you thought about our miniseries. What Remains. You can email us at Outsideinradio@nhpr.org. You can also hit us up at Instagram. We’re at OutsideinRadio. And join our Facebook Group. Outside/In.
Archival tape was from the documentary, The African Burial Ground, an American discovery.