Pennsylvania
Penn Museum buries bones of 19 Black Philadelphians, causing dispute with community members
PHILADELPHIA — For decades, the University of Pennsylvania has held hundreds of skulls that once were used to promote white supremacy through racist scientific research.
As part of a growing effort among museums to reevaluate the curation of human remains, the Ivy League school laid some of the remains to rest last week, specifically those identified as belonging to 19 Black Philadelphians. Officials held a memorial service for them on Saturday.
The university says it is trying to begin rectifying past wrongs. But some community members feel excluded from the process, illustrating the challenges that institutions face in addressing institutional racism.
“Repatriation should be part of what the museum does, and we should embrace it,” said Christopher Woods, the museum’s director.
The university houses more than 1,000 human remains from all over the world, and Woods said repatriating those identified as from the local community felt like the best place to start.
Some leaders and advocates for the affected Black communities in Philadelphia have pushed back against the plan for years. They say the decision to reinter the remains in Eden Cemetery, a local historic Black cemetery, was made without their input.
West Philadelphia native and community activist Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad said justice isn’t just the university doing the right thing, it’s letting the community decide what that should look like.
“That’s not repatriation. We’re saying that Christopher Woods does not get to decide to do that,” Muhammad said. “The same institution that has been holding and exerting control for years over these captive ancestors is not the same institution that can give them ceremony.”
Woods told the crowd at Saturday’s interfaith commemoration at the university’s Penn Museum that the identities of the 19 people were not recorded, but that the process of interment in above-ground mausoleums “is by design fully reversible if the facts and circumstances change.” If future research allows any of the remains to be identified and a claim is made, they can be “easily retrieved and entrusted to descendants,” he said.
“It will be a very happy day if we can return at least some of these fellow citizens to their descendants,” Woods said.
At a blessing and committal ceremony later at Eden Cemetery, about 10 miles southwest of the museum in Collingdale, Renee McBride Williams, a member of the community advisory group, said she was “relived that finally the people who created the problem are finding a solution.”
“In my home growing up, when you made a mistake, you fixed it – you accepted responsibility for what you did,” she said.
“We may not know their names, but they lived, and they are remembered, and they will not be forgotten,” said the Rev. Charles Lattimore Howard, the university’s chaplain and vice president for social equity & community.
As the racial justice movement has swept across the country in recent years, many museums and universities have begun to prioritize the repatriation of collections that were either stolen or taken under unethical circumstances. But only one group of people often harmed by archaeology and anthropology, Native Americans, have a federal law that regulates this process.
In cases like that between the University of Pennsylvania and Black Philadelphians, institutions maintain control over the collections and how they are returned.
The remains of the Black Philadelphians were part of the Morton Cranial Collection at the Penn Museum. Beginning in the 1830s, physician and professor Samuel George Morton collected about 900 crania, and after his death the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia added hundreds more.
Morton’s goal with the collection was to prove – by measuring crania – that the races were actually different species of humans, with white being the superior species. His racist pseudoscience influenced generations of scientific research and was used to justify slavery in the antebellum South.
Morton also was a medical professor in Philadelphia, where most doctors of his time trained, said Lyra Monteiro, an anthropological archaeologist and professor at Rutgers University. The vestiges of his since-disproven work are still evident across the medical field, she said.
“Medical racism can really exist on the back of that,” Monteiro said. “His ideas became part of how medical students were trained.”
The collection has been housed at the university since 1966, and some of the remains were used for teaching as late as 2020. The university issued an apology in 2021 and revised its protocol for handling human remains.
The university also formed an advisory committee to decide next steps. The group decided to rebury the remains at Eden Cemetery. The following year, the university successfully petitioned the Philadelphia Orphans’ Court to allow the burial on the basis that the identities of all but one of the Black Philadelphians were unknown.
Critics note the advisory committee was comprised almost entirely of university officials and local religious leaders, rather than other community members.
Monteiro and other researchers challenged the idea that the identities of the Philadelphians were lost to time. Through the city’s public archives, she discovered that one of the men’s mothers was Native American. His remains must be repatriated through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the federal law regulating the return of Native American ancestral remains and funerary objects, she said.
“They never did any research themselves on who these people were, they took Morton’s word for it,” Monteiro said. “The people who aren’t even willing to do the research should not be doing this.”
The university removed that cranium from the reburial so it can be assessed for return through NAGPRA. Monteiro and others were further outraged to discover the university had already interred the remains of the other Black Philadelphians last weekend outside of public view, she said.
Members of the Black Philadelphians Descendant Community Group, which was organized by people including Muhammad who identify as descendants of the individuals in the mausoleum, said in a statement they are “devastated & hurt” that the burial took place without them.
“In light of this new information, they are taking time to process and consider how best to honor their ancestors at a future time,” the group said, adding that members plan to offer handouts at Saturday’s memorial with information they have gathered on the individuals in the mausoleum.
“To balance prioritizing the human dignity of the individuals with conservation due diligence and the logistical requirements of Historic Eden Cemetery, laying to rest the 19 Black Philadelphians was scheduled ahead of the interfaith ceremony and blessing,” the Penn Museum said in a statement to The Associated Press.
Woods said he believes most of the community is happy with the decision to reinter the remains at Eden Cemetery, and it is a vocal minority in opposition. He hopes that eventually all the individuals in the mausoleum will be identified and returned.
“We encourage research to be done moving forward,” Woods said, noting the remains of the Black Philadelphians were in the collection for two centuries and, along with his staff, he felt the need to take more immediate action with those remains.
“Let’s not let these individuals sit in the museum storeroom and extend those 200 years anymore,” he said.
Even if all the crania are identified and returned to the community, the university has a long way to go. More than 300 Native American remains in the Morton Cranial Collection still need to be repatriated through the federal law. Woods said the museum recently hired additional staff to expedite that process.
Copyright © 2024 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Pennsylvania
Trump to hold rally in Erie as Pennsylvania becomes key 2024 battleground
Of the seven competitive states that both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic rival, have a realistic shot at winning, Pennsylvania is the most populous and awards the most votes in the Electoral College, which in turn is used to select the overall winner of the election.
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Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate is set to hold a rally in Pennsylvania today, his fourth campaign stop in the state this month. Erie, located in the northwest corner of Pennsylvania, will host the former president at 2 pm local time.
This rally comes one month after his running mate, US Senator JD Vance held a similar event in the same city. Trump has another rally scheduled in western Pennsylvania for October 5.
Pennsylvania has emerged as a crucial battleground state in the 2024 election, with many of Trump’s allies considering it the most important state to win. The state’s significance stems from its large population and the substantial number of electoral votes it awards, making it a critical factor in determining the overall winner of the election.
In fact, among the seven competitive states that both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have a realistic chance of winning, Pennsylvania stands out as the most populous and electorally valuable.
Trump allies broadly believe that if the former president beats Harris there, he is likely to return to the White House. But if Trump loses to Harris in Pennsylvania, the vice president has the inside track, in their opinion.
In a reflection of the stakes, Harris and Trump have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads in Pennsylvania in the months before the election, more than any other state in both gross and per capita terms.
Erie, the site of Trump’s rally, is a battleground inside a battleground. Erie County is one of two Pennsylvania counties that favored Trump in the 2016 election against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton before favoring President Joe Biden against Trump in 2020.
Trump narrowly won the state and the election overall in 2016, before losing both in 2020.
This time around, Pennsylvania is again competitive, according to surveys. Harris leads Trump by 1.6 percentage points in the state, according to an average of polls maintained by polling and analysis website FiveThirtyEight. That difference is well within almost all polls’ margin of error.
Trump’s next rally in Pennsylvania, on Oct. 5, will take place in Butler, about 100 miles (160 km) south of Erie. That town was the site of a failed assassination attempt on Trump in July. A bullet grazed the former president’s ear.
With inputs from agencies.
Pennsylvania
JD Vance crisscrosses battleground Pennsylvania at a rally in Newtown, Bucks County
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Pennsylvania
How to be a poll worker in Pennsylvania
Who can I contact if I have more questions?
You can call 1-877-VOTESPA (1-877-868-3772) or email ra-voterreg@pa.gov with questions about the poll worker interest form. You can also reach out to your local county’s election office for more details. For the Greater Philadelphia area, the contacts are the following:
Bucks County
Elections & Voter Registration
55 E. Court St.
Doylestown, Pennsylvania, 18901
Phone: (215) 348-6154
Email: elections@buckscounty.org
Chester County
Elections
Karen Barsoum
Government Services Center
601 Westtown Road, Ste. 150
PO Box 2747
West Chester, Pennsylvania, 19380-0990
Phone: (610) 344-6410
Email: ccelectionofficials@chesco.org
Voter registration
Stephanie Saitis
Government Services Center
601 Westtown Rd., Ste. 150
PO Box 2747
West Chester, Pennsylvania, 19380-0990
Phone: (610) 344-6410
Email: ccelectionofficials@chesco.org
Delaware County
Elections
Laureen Hagan
Chief Clerk/Director
201 W. Front St.
Government Center Building
Media, Pennsylvania, 19063
Phone: (610) 891-4673
Email: DelcoElection@co.delaware.pa.us
Voter Registration
Crystal Winterbottom
Interim Voter Registration Director
201 W. Front St.
Government Center Building
Media, Pennsylvania, 19063
Phone: (610) 891-4659
Email: DelcoElection@co.delaware.pa.us
Montgomery County
Elections & Voter Registration
Montgomery County Voter Services
One Montgomery Plaza
425 Swede St., Suite 602
Norristown, Pennsylvania, 19401
Phone: (610) 278-3280
Email: montcovotes@montgomerycountypa.gov
Philadelphia County
Elections
Philadelphia County Board of Elections
142 City Hall
1400 JFK Blvd.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19107
Phone: (215) 686-3469
Voter Registration
Voter Registration Office
520 N Columbus Blvd.
5th Floor
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19123
Phone: (215) 686-1590
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