Yesterday, for the second time in a single month, the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania issued an apology for its callous and careless handling of human remains. Last Wednesday, media outlets reported that Penn had not only been holding on to the remains of two teenage girls since their deaths at the hands of city authorities in the 1985 MOVE bombing, but had also a) transferred them to Princeton b) allowed them to be used in undergraduate research and teaching modules and c) claimed to not know their current location.
There’s so much violence to unpack in that paragraph. The background: On May 13, 1985, the city of Philadelphia firebombed a house on the 6200 block of Osage Avenue, about two miles west of Penn. The home was occupied by activists and children associated with MOVE, a movement for Black liberation. Eleven occupants, including six adults and five children, died. The police also ordered first responders to let the building burn, so the flames inevitably spread through the rowhouse blocks. By the time the smoke cleared, nearly two blocks of West Philadelphia had been razed and more than 250 people were rendered homeless. The closest that the city has come to accountability was issuing a formal apology last November, just weeks after police murdered Walter Wallace on the 6100 block of Locust, less than 5 blocks away.
During the investigation that followed the bombing, the Medical Examiner’s office transferred the remains thought to belong to Tree Africa, 14, and Delisha Africa, 12, to Penn anthropology professor Alan Mann for further analysis. For reasons that are unclear, Mann kept them, even after his move to Princeton in 2002. Since then, the remains—reportedly stored in a cardboard box—shuttled back and forth between the two institutions, at one point forming the centerpiece of a teaching module. Last Friday, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Penn had only released the remains to Mann, now a professor emeritus at Princeton, the previous Saturday, presumably to stay ahead of an op-ed demanding reparations. The chair of Princeton’s anthropology department, meanwhile, defended Mann’s possession of the remains, saying “This is no controversy. This is a problem to be solved…There’s no racism. There was a forensic investigation and nobody came to claim the remains.”
Whew. What do you even say about someone who says “There’s no racism” in the context of mishandling of human remains associated with the MOVE bombing??
For a more coherent perspective, I turned to Ezelle Sanford III, a postdoc with the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society (PRSS). In role as the project manager for the Penn Medicine and the Afterlives of Slavery Project, Ezelle researches the history and legacy of enslavement and its relationship to the institutional development of the Perelman School of Medicine. We had a wide-ranging conversation about how so many human remains have ended up in American research institutions in the first place and why they remain there in the twenty-first century.
Pre-pandemic, the plan for Ezelle’s position involved making space for community-wide conversations about what it might look like for Penn, particularly its med school, to begin repairing its relationship with Philadelphia. Given this, I reached out to him as soon as I heard about this story last week. His immediate response: “This is not going to bode well for Penn’s relationship with Black Philadelphia. It’s just not.”
For those readers who don’t live in Philadelphia (presumably most of you), it’s worth emphasizing that the city’s decision to hand over these girls’ bodies to Penn, and Penn’s disregard for their safekeeping, fit a pattern too familiar to the city’s residents. There is, of course, the med school’s long history of graverobbing, which is part of what PRSS hopes to address. Ezelle told me, “One of the first steps is going to have to be transparency about some of the collections that are still there, the human remains that are still there, an honest acknowledgement of the history that has used Black people’s bodies, particularly in medical education and clinical research. An acknowledgement that Black people have worth and value and need to be treated as such, even in death.”
And it’s not just the med school. At least 50 of the approximately 1,300 skulls in the Penn Museum’s Morton Cranial Collection are known to have belonged to enslaved Africans in Cuba; a recent PRSS report finds that at least 14 more came from Black Philadelphians’ graves associated with a local almshouse. That, in fact, was the topic of Penn’s previous apology, issued two weeks ago. But even without the specific information on the sources of these particular skulls, stories of graverobbing have long sort of circulated in Black urban culture. “I mean, I grew up hearing those kinds of stories,” Ezelle said.
It’s important to understand that Penn has neglected the living as well as the dead. Penn and its affiliated health system is by far the largest employer in Philadelphia, yet Philadelphia remains the poorest of the United States’ ten largest cities. As a nonprofit organization, Penn does not pay property taxes, but neither does it pay so-called PILOTS, or payments in lieu of property taxes. Penn offers a homebuying assistance program for its employees that simultaneously contributes to gentrification in parts of West Philly and depresses property values in others (including, not coincidentally, 62nd and Osage). Penn funds a showstopper of a public school in the area closest to campus, while the city’s other public schools struggle to deal with lead, asbestos, and mold.
The list goes on, but suffice it to say: Penn hasn’t been a great neighbor. Racism in science isn’t just something that happened a century ago or that ended with the revelations of the Tuskegee experiment. It’s something that happens every time researchers extract value from things that don’t belong to them. It happens every time a new administrator decides not to follow up on rumors about what’s in the storage rooms. It happens every day that research universities don’t contribute their fair shares to city coffers.
Yesterday, I received my second Pfizer vaccine shot. Penn Medicine would like you to know that both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines rely on mRNA technology developed at and patented by Penn. Incidentally, as of last weekend, only 19 percent of Black Philadelphians have had at least one vaccine dose, compared to 40 percent of the city’s white residents.
Neither the wonders of contemporary science nor its horrors are distributed equally.
Take Action:
Everyone: Sign this petition endorsing MOVE’s demands
Philadelphians: Come out to a rally on at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 28th, at the Penn Museum
Current Penn faculty and staff: Sign on to the Penn for PILOTS movement
Penn alumni: Add your name to the alumni PILOTs petition
I also invite readers to donate to the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium, which has been doing more than any other organization in Philadelphia to make sure that residents of Black and Brown neighborhoods have access to testing and vaccines. Or, support a similar organization in your own back yard.
A big thank you to Ezelle Sanford III for sharing his expertise on the history of Philadelphia’s medical institutions with me. Later this week, I’ll be sharing an edited version of our conversation with premium subscribers.