Penn Museum committed to repatriating skulls of Black Philadelphians used for racist science. Here’s why experts say the burial was rushed and unethical

On Saturday, the Penn Museum will host a public commemoration and interfaith burial service for 19 unidentified Black Philadelphians, likely enslaved during their lifetimes, who died in the 1830s and 1840s but were never laid to rest. Their skulls were severed from their bodies and stolen by white supremacist scientist Samuel G. Morton, who added them to his collection of more than 1,300 crania — to be examined by anthropologists for nearly 200 years.

But this ceremony won’t put to rest the controversy around Penn’s handling of these remains. Instead, it adds another messy chapter to what has become an increasingly complex and fraught debate over what repatriation looks like in practice.

While the public ceremony will be held this weekend, Penn has already interred the remains in secret. On Jan. 22, a small group including museum director Christopher Woods witnessed placement of the remains in two mausolea at Eden Cemetery, a historic African American cemetery in Collingdale, Pa.

The move stunted the efforts of opponents who had been trying to stop the burial since the museum set the plan in motion years ago.

Experts and critics say Penn’s efforts have been rushed forward without adequate research to identify these individuals, and accuse Penn of shirking community accountability in the name of expediency. The museum insists that it has consulted with Black community leaders in West Philadelphia, who expressly favored the burial. But, Penn acknowledges, this isn’t repatriation, the return of human remains to their descendants. If emerging research identifies living lineal descendants, Penn says it maintains the right to reopen the mausolea and retrieve those remains.

“We’re not giving them away. We’re not transferring them. We’re not burying them underground and making them inaccessible,” said Woods. “This, for us, is where these individuals should be right now, as a matter of appropriate storage.”

The public became aware of the existence of these remains at Penn in 2019, when West Philadelphia native aAliy A. Muhammad wrote an Inquirer op-ed demanding the repatriation of all crania from the Morton collection. A year later, Penn created a committee to address Morton’s legacy after the murder of George Floyd led to renewed calls for accountability surrounding the university’s colonial and racist history.

Muhammad also found out that Penn was secretly keeping the remains of children who were killed in the MOVE bombings in 1985, sparking a national outcry. The public also learned that Morton’s collection contained the crania of Black Philadelphians stolen from bodies that were likely buried in a potter’s field where Penn’s Franklin Field now sits.

The then newly-appointed Woods apologized and committed to repatriating the remains from MOVE and Morton’s collection. He formed the Morton Cranial Collection Community Advisory Group, made up of six Penn employees and eight spiritual and community leaders from West Philadelphia, including Muhammad, who later withdrew in disagreement.

Though the current best practice for repatriation is giving descendants control over any burial or research decisions, Penn moved forward with approval from its own group. The museum petitioned the Philadelphia Orphans Court for permission to bury these remains as soon as possible, in May 2022.

Dismayed over a rushed process without adequate public input, Muhammad filed an objection and called for greater community control over the decision making. Muhammad insisted that more research was needed to try to identify the Philadelphians to potentially connect with descendants. With Rutgers history professor Lyra Monteiro, who also filed an objection, they formed Finding Ceremony, a collective fighting for an independent, descendant-led repatriation process. The pair argued that Penn should give control to Philadelphians who claim the deceased as their ancestors: a descendant community.

The Philadelphia Orphans Court judge ultimately threw out the opposition, saying it lacked legal standing. In February 2023, Judge Sheila Woods-Skipper approved Penn’s plan to entomb the remains at Eden Cemetery and decreed that they do so within one year.

A descendant community broadly includes people who share the social group characteristics of the deceased, such as a community of Black Philadelphians, who serve as a voice for their ancestors. They — not the institution — choose if, when, and how these remains should be buried, said bioanthropologist Michael Blakey, who coined the term in the 1990s.

“The decision is entirely the business of descendants,” said Blakey, professor at the College of William and Mary who serves as cochair of the American Anthropological Association’s commission for the ethical treatment of human remains. “That would take a longer process. They should be allowed that process … and getting it right is important.”

Blakey identified the Morton Cranial Collection Advisory Group as an example of a committee that could organize public forums to foster the creation of an independent descendant community that has “a coherent voice and can act with integrity.”

For Woods, the advisory group served as a stand-in for a descendant community, but Blakey sees the Penn-appointed group as an extension of the administration.

Renee McBride-Williams, president of Cedar Park Neighbors, one of the group’s earliest members, was unfamiliar with the descendant community concept. But she is not sure how different the outcome would have been had there been a formal descendant community in place. “If they were to do a survey of all the people who want to engage, how many people’s opinions will be different? Do we bury them, or do we not? Was racism involved, or not? To me, it would not have really [made] a lot of difference.”

Penn got approval to bury 20 skulls, an expanded number accounting for ones that were added to the collection after Morton’s death. The decision was based on a January 2023 report detailing what Penn said was all the information available about who these Black Philadelphians were, mostly from Morton’s own records.

But last week, the museum decided to withhold one skull, of the only person whose name we do know: John Voorhees, a porter from Chester County who died of tuberculosis.

Woods made the decision after receiving a new report from Monteiro and a group of volunteer researchers that found Voorhees had Native American ancestry — therefore subject to protections under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act — and was survived by a wife and child, establishing a potential for identifying living descendants.

The researchers alleged that in moving Voorhees, Penn would violate NAGPRA, which prevents remains from being transferred to another institution that is not required to comply with the act. But that’s not the case because the museum continues to be in control.

Keeping Voorhees at the museum will “make it even easier for tribes to make a visitation,” Woods said. “It’s an effort to show we’re listening to people … it doesn’t make a fundamental difference to us.”

Woods also said that the volunteer researchers’ work “corroborated what we’re finding” at the museum. An independent genealogist is researching Voorhees and the other Black Philadelphians, and Woods expects that report to come out “any week now.”

Critics say it’s a tacit admission of insufficient research.

Woods contends that because no one has yet identified another name or a living descendant, research is a “secondary concern.” The priority should be moving the deceased out of the museum. As the court decree stipulated, the remains are in an aboveground crypt that grants Penn “forever access to the extent that access is needed in the future.” That means if there are future claims from descendants, Penn can retrieve the remains from the burial site. They remain part of Penn’s collection as they have not been formally deaccessioned and the museum maintains access to them.

That arrangement doesn’t sit well with community members or experts.

“It’s authorized grave robbing once again,” said Kathleen Fine Dare, a Colorado-based NAGPRA scholar who has worked with Finding Ceremony. “If you put somebody into a mausoleum, they’re supposed to stay there forever, and have their souls be at rest … If documentation reveals, say, that one of them was Native, you’re gonna go open a crypt, and pull those remains?”

“This institution cannot both be the institution that holds captive remains of people and the institution that is going to give them ceremony — those two things can’t exist together,” said Muhammad, who helped found a Black Philadelphians Descendant Community Group in May 2023. “This is about making the institution look good, not about being respectful to these people.”

Sacharja Cunningham, a poet and educator from Brooklyn who moved to West Philly to attend Penn’s Graduate School of Education, is also part of the descendant community group. “Penn should halt the burial plans then pay for our descendant group to create an intermediate space for our ancestors and move them there so that they’re out of Penn Museum,” he wrote in an email before learning of Penn’s private burial. “Ultimately, I hope that our descendant group can have the time and space to carefully plan a ceremony for putting our ancestors to proper rest.”

Instead, the group is planning to share a handout of information about the deceased on Saturday, and will support each other after what Muhammad described on X as a “dehumanizing, anti-Black act” and “horrific happening.”

Woods and the advisory group believe they have given these Black Philadelphians a respectful rest. “I realize that other institutions might make different decisions, but I don’t think there is one set of rules or a single process that is ‘right,’” said Woods. “It’s not a one-size fits all situation.”

Experts say this situation doesn’t bode well for Penn’s future efforts to continue dismantling the Morton collection, as repatriation to other countries will be even more complex.

“This was an opportunity for repair which could end with good feelings... But instead, the process has been insufficiently inclusive and allowed insufficient community empowerment because it has moved too fast for that to happen,” said Blakey. “Those are decisions that are made by the university. That is apparently what they’re willing to live with.”