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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 pepatriation 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.
Now, more than 150 years later, those skulls were returned to New Orleans and will be memorialized and laid to rest on Saturday – the location of the rest of their remains is unknown. A visitation will take place at Dillard University’s Lawless Memorial Chapel with a service. A memorial and jazz funeral are also scheduled for that day.
And the remains of 17 of the 19 – Adam Grant, Isaak Bell, Hiram Smith, William Pierson, Henry Williams, John Brown, Hiram Malone, William Roberts, Alice Brown, Prescilla Hatchet, Marie Louise, Mahala (last name unknown), Samuel Prince, John Tolman, Henry Allen, Moses Willis and Henry Anderson – will be laid to rest with their names. Two of the 19 could not be identified. All of the remains will be stored at the Hurricane Katrina Memorial.
“This is not simply about bones and artifacts. It is not only about injustices. This is about restoring and, in many ways for us here, celebrating our humanity,” Guillory said. “It is about confronting a dark chapter in medical and scientific history, and choosing instead a path of justice, honor and remembrance. And we will do so in the most sacred way we know how: in a true New Orleans fashion, with a jazz funeral that shows the world these people mattered. They belonged. They belonged here, and now they are home.”
