Chatter hushed inside the Cook Theatre at Dillard University on Wednesday morning (May 28) as history professor Eva Baham read the names and ages — some in their teens — of 19 African Americans whose skulls were shipped from Charity Hospital in New Orleans to Germany in the late 1800s as “specimens” to be studied to justify racist and colonialist notions of the time.
Baham leads a team of academics who have worked to return the 19 skulls back to New Orleans after more than a century of displacement. The skulls, which had been housed at the University of Leipzig, are now back and will soon be laid to rest.
On Wednesday, Baham’s Cultural Repatriation Committee announced a traditional New Orleans Jazz funeral, open to the public, on Saturday, May 31. The event will be preceded by a viewing and memorial service at Dillard’s Lawless Memorial Chapel at 9 a.m.
“This is about restoring and, in many ways for us here, celebrating our humanity,” Dillard University President Monique Guillory said at the beginning of the press conference. “It is about confronting a dark chapter in medical and scientific history, and choosing instead, a path of justice, honor, and remembrance.”
That “dark chapter” was a period in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when phrenology, a now-discredited pseudoscience that involved the study of the size and shape of the skull, gained popularity. Many phrenology backers believed that Europeans’ skulls tended to indicate higher intelligence and aptitude than those of other races, and the pseudoscience was used to justify slavery and other forms of race-based oppression.
In the 1880s, German doctor Emil Ludwig Schmidt received the 19 skulls from Charity Hospital, through New Orleans doctor Henry D. Schmidt. He later donated the skulls, along with more than 1,000 others that he had collected and studied, to the University of Leipzig, where they remained catalogued with “racialized/colonialist labels,” according to a Dillard University press release.
According to Baham, in 2023, the University of Leipzig contacted city of New Orleans officials, offering to repatriate the craniums. The following year, Baham and her team began researching the lives of the people whose bodies had been mutilated.
Freddi Williams Evans, a genealogy researcher and an expert on New Orleans’ Congo Square, worked alongside Baham to identify the 19 people, and to search for family connections. They used hospital records to document their names and ages. And they poured over available U.S. Census information, as the deceased had passed in 1871 and 1872 just after Census records began including Black Americans by name. But given the circumstances of the lives of the 19 people — born when slavery was the law of the land — the records were limited, and the team was unable to connect the 19 people to any living descendants.
“Many of them probably had come as a result of domestic slave trade. So that means they were already detached often from any relatives or any kind of relationship that could have led us to identify descendants,” Evans said in an interview after the press conference. “This is just another example of the repercussions of what happened.”
The skulls were returned last week with the help of the D.W. Rhodes Funeral Home, where committee members held a small, initial service ahead of this weekend’s “final homegoing,” as Guillory described it.
At Wednesday’s press conference, New Orleans City Councilmember Eugene Green called on the country to learn from this period in American history and applauded the Black community for overcoming adversity.
“Let us continue to celebrate the great accomplishment that we have made as an African American community,” Green said. “The way that these folks were dehumanized isn’t a reflection on us, because our future is so great.”
To move forward and restore humanity to the 19 people whose remains have been returned to New Orleans, committee member and Xavier art professor Sheleen Jones is preparing vessels – adorned with imagery symbolizing love and compassion – to hold the remains that will ultimately be laid to rest at the Hurricane Katrina Memorial on Canal Street.
In the absence of known descendants, Baham called on the New Orleans community to represent the families of the 19 people whose skulls have been returned at Saturday’s Jazz funeral.
“Come out, to be a part of bringing dignity to people from whom it was taken,” Baham said. “We are not here to belabor the past, but rather to say that we move forward.”
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