Museum in Pennsylvania, United States collects skulls of Black Americans. The skulls belong to the Black Americans as well as Slaves from Cuba. The museum has apologized for collecting the skulls of Black Americans and agreed to return the remains to their communities.
According to The Philadelphia Inquirer reports, the remains consist of skulls of at least 12 Black Philadelphians and dozens of enslaved people from Africa to Cuba.
Christopher Woods, the museum’s director, expressed that the museum would relinquish control of the skulls.
“The Penn Museum and the University of Pennsylvania apologize for the unethical possession of human remains in the Morton Collection,” Christopher said.
“It is time for these individuals to be returned to their ancestral communities, wherever possible, as a step toward atonement and repair for the racist and colonial practices that were integral to the formation of these collections.”
The museum stated that the remains of Black Philadelphians will be buried at a “historically Black Philadelphia cemetery.”
The Morton Collection is titled after Samuel G. Morton, a 19th-century Philadelphia physician, and anthropologist who accumulated hundreds of skulls to compare the brain sizes of different races. His research had been referred to as evidence that Europeans “were intellectually, morally, and physically superior to all other races,” the museum said.
The decision to return the skulls follows the publication of an internal report on April 8 that said the museum “should return ancestors to their descendants and communities of origin whenever possible.” The collection of skulls was eliminated from public view in July 2020, The New York Times announced.
In 2019, students at the University of Pennsylvania found that 55 skulls kept in the collection originated from people enslaved in Havana, Cuba, or the US.
Christopher said it would be difficult to return the skulls of those enslaved in Cuba.
“This one is going to be a bit more complicated because, for a lot of these individuals, the records are terrible or nonexistent,” he informed the Inquirer.
“It’s uncertain which actually have to go back to Cuba, or probably more likely, West Africa.”
