“19 Black New Orleanians’ heads were dismembered and shipped to Leipzig University”

Adria R Walker,The Guardian

Remains dating back to late 18th century are being repatriated and interred, with commemoration and jazz funeral

In the late 1800s, 19 Black New Orleanians’ heads were dismembered and shipped to Leipzig University in Germany for research. The 19 had died at New Orleans’ charity hospital between 1871 and 1872, and the research, which was commonplace at the time, sought to confirm and explore the now widely debunked theory that Black people’s brains were smaller than those of other races.

In the 1880s, Dr Henry D Schmidt, a New Orleans physician, sent the skulls to Dr Emil Ludwig Schmidt. They were taken from the bodies of 13 men, four women and two unidentified people.

“They were stripped of their dignity,” Dillard University’s president, Monique Guillory, said at a news conference on Wednesday. “They were people with names. They were people with stories and histories. Some of them had families, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, human beings.”

Leipzig University is in the process of repatriating skulls, bringing them back to their original locations. To that end, in 2023, representatives from the university contacted the city of New Orleans to inform it of the 19 skulls. The city formed a cultural repatriation committee, led by historian Eva Baham, which includes representatives from Dillard University, the city of New Orleans, the University medical center and other community partners.

Over the course of the last two years, the cultural repatriation committee attempted, unsuccessfully, to contact descendants of the victims. Still, they were able to find out the names of the deceased and their ages (ranging from 15 to 70), what they died from and how long they had been in New Orleans – in one instance, one of the people had been in New Orleans for only hour before dying. Only five of the identified people were from Louisiana; the others were from Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Kentucky.

Read more to of the 19 New Orleanians’ heads dismembered.

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