Ivy League colleges urged to apologise for using bones of Black children in teaching – The Guardian

Two Ivy League institutions, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton, are facing mounting demands to apologise and make restitution for their handling over decades of the bones of African American children killed by Philadelphia police in 1985.

As calls pour in for action to be taken over the use of the children’s remains as props in an online Princeton anthropology course – without permission from parents of the dead children – there is also rising concern about the whereabouts of the bones.

Fragments belonging to one or possibly two Black children have been held by the universities for 36 years, but now appear to have gone missing.

They are currently in use as a “case study” in an online forensic anthropology course fronted by Princeton that is openly available on the internet. The bones are shown on camera as teaching tools – without the blessing of relatives who were unaware their loved ones’ remains were harboured in academic collections.

The course, Real Bones: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology, is presented by Prof Janet Monge, an expert on bone collections who is on faculty at both Princeton and Penn. On video, she holds up the pelvis and femur of a girl whose remains were collected from the ashes of the 13 May 1985 police bombing of the headquarters of Move, a Philadelphia-based black liberation and back-to-nature group.

Eleven group members died in the fire, including five children.

As calls grew from present-day Move members, Philadelphia politicians and academics for the institutions to be held accountable, Princeton eventually responded. It said that it had only become aware of the controversy surrounding the class, distributed on the platform Coursera, on Wednesday but late on Friday the institution announced that it had decided to suspend the course.

“We are in the process of gathering and understanding all of the related facts, and out of respect for the victims of the Move bombing and their families we have suspended the online course,” Michael Hotchkiss, a Princeton spokesperson said.

But that is unlikely to satisfy those impacted by the revelations. “There needs to be a full investigation and disclosure from all parties involved,” said Michael Africa Jr, a Move member who was six at the time of the bombing.

“We want a formal and public apology from Penn, Princeton and any of the anthropologists involved, and we want reparations – there has got to be some kind of restitution for this insanity.”

Move, in alliance with the Philadelphia branch of Black Lives Matter, will stage a rally on 28 April outside Penn Museum, the part of University of Pennsylvania where the children’s bones were kept for years in a cardboard box. A number of demands will be made, including that the bones are returned to relatives.

That might be easier said than done, given that the location of the fragments is a mystery. The University of Pennsylvania told the Guardian the bones had been handed to Princeton. Princeton told the Guardian it did not have any such remains.

“We need the bones to be returned so that we can lay them to rest,” Africa Jr said.

Jamie Gauthier, the Democratic council member who represents the area of Philadelphia devastated by the bombing, said the inability to find the remains was unacceptable.

“We need to find them and give them back so that they can be properly buried,” she said.

Gauthier played a key role in moving the city council last year to make a formal apology for the 1985 bombing, in which C4 plastic explosives were dropped by police helicopter on the Move house, igniting a massive fire. As part of the apology, 13 May has been declared a day of remembrance.

The council member said she was “disgusted” to learn the two Ivy League colleges had held the bones for decades without permission.

“It shows enormous disrespect for Black life and for a child or children who were murdered by their own government,” she said. “They suffered such trauma in life, and then even in death these institutions couldn’t find it within themselves to see them as human. That’s the only way I can understand this, because you only treat someone’s remains like this if you see them as ‘other’.”

Among the growing calls are demands for reparations or restitution for the Move family. The idea was floated this week by Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, an organiser from West Philadelphia writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Gauthier backed the demand.

“The universities used the remains of the Move children to grow their own research and platform,” she said, “and they need to compensate the family for that.”

The furore comes at a sensitive time for academic institutions, especially Penn, which last week apologised for its museum’s “unethical possession of human remains” in its Samuel Morton Cranial collection. The 19th-century collection, used by Morton to justify theories of white supremacy, included the remains of Black Philadelphians and 53 crania of enslaved people from Cuba and the US which will now be repatriated or reburied.

Paul Wolff Mitchell, a PhD candidate in anthropology at Penn who has researched the Morton collection and who participates in student activism around redressing the historical harm inflicted on Black communities by scientific practices, pointed out that the first public protest outside Penn Museum was organised as recently as 8 April in relation to the Morton collection.

“As a result of the discovery of the retention of these Move remains, and their use as a case study in an anthropology course, I’m certain that this first ever protest will not be the last,” Mitchell said.