Hey, it's Jason Moon.I am back in the feed for two reasons.The first is just to let you know that we are still reporting both seasons of this podcast, and things are happening in both cases.
People are still working really hard to find out who the last remaining unidentified victim is in the Bear Brook case from season one. And as for Season 2 and Jason Carroll, the long-awaited DNA testing in the case is finally underway.
And when there are big updates on either of those stories, we'll be back with a new episode.So all to say, stay subscribed. The second thing I'm here to tell you about is a new series called What Remains.
It comes from my colleagues at Outside In, another great narrative podcast from NHPR about the places where curiosity and the natural world collide.Outside In is led by Taylor Quimby, who helped make Barebrook season one.
I got to listen to an early draft of What Remains, and I was totally gripped by it.
For months, reporter Felix Poon has been digging into how museums, universities, and other big institutions are rethinking what to do with their collections of human remains.Felix zooms in on one particular example at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia.
It is a wild story.I had no idea how complicated and controversial this stuff could be. And at the center of it are some really big, thorny ethical questions that I think Bear Brook listeners might appreciate.
We're dropping part one of the series right here so you can check it out.If you're into it, the next episode is available in the Outside In feed.Okay, here it is.
A quick heads up for listeners.This episode contains some swear words and descriptions of violence. In 2018, Paul Wolf Mitchell was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.
He was teaching an intro to anthropology course, and one day, a student came up to talk to him at the end of class.
And he was really, really bright, but he was very shy because he was the youngest person in the classroom.
He was actually a high school student given permission to take a few courses at Penn.
Both of his parents were from Nigeria, and he started to ask me why there were all of these these skulls on the wall in this classroom.
All around this particular classroom were hundreds of human skulls, yellowed with age and lined in wooden cabinets in rows, the way you might display antique pottery.Most of them had labels pasted across their actual foreheads.
The student asked me, why is it that there are these skulls that are labeled as coming from Africa?
Paul went on to explain that these hundreds of skulls were from all over the world, but the ones he was asking about were from people born in Africa who were taken across the Atlantic to Cuba, where they were enslaved and died.
And then sometime later, their skulls were exhumed and sent to Philadelphia to a doctor and scientist named Samuel Morton. Morton earned his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania and then acted as an advisor to Penn's medical students.
He went on to be known as the father of physical anthropology.But he was also, in one of the most literal uses of the term, racist.He believed that human races are separate species and that they can be ranked with white people like him at the top.
And Paul explained to this kid that Morton set out to prove it by amassing a collection of hundreds of human skulls, which he filled with lead shot and seeds to test their capacity.
Morton's work was so influential that Charles Darwin called him an authority on the subject of race. This was all happening before the Civil War, by the way.And to be clear, this pseudoscientific brand of white supremacy has been utterly debunked.
But here it was on full display in 2018.
As I explained it, I realized, you know, the more context that I'm giving, it's not justifying this or making this any better.
The Morton Cranial Collection, as it's called, includes an estimated 1,300 skulls, all of them held in various states of storage at the prestigious Penn Museum, UPenn's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
I'm a white person, and I don't think that for me, initially, and it's something that you know, not proud of, but it simply is the case that I don't think initially I asked enough questions.I sort of was not critical enough about the history.
In the past couple of decades, elite schools like Penn have been wrestling with their ties to slavery.Brown University published a report in 2006 acknowledging the quote, deep intertwined history of the slave trade and the university.
Georgetown apologized for the sale of hundreds of enslaved people in the 1800s.But not Penn.
The narrative went something like, the University of Pennsylvania is in Philadelphia.Philadelphia is north of the Mason-Dixon line.The northern states were not slave states.Therefore, the University of Pennsylvania has no complicity in slavery.
And the spokesman for Penn had stated that there was no slavery in Penn's DNA.
No slavery in Penn's DNA. A handful of students, including Paul Wolfe Mitchell, heard this statement and they took it as a challenge.They dug into archives and records, and here's what they found.
Penn itself never enslaved people, but members of the faculty and trustees did.Plus the school went after donations from wealthy enslavers in southern states.
And Penn is home to the nation's oldest medical school, where Samuel Morton taught his white supremacist theories about race and intelligence.
Race was a major part of the medical curriculum.Racial science was integral to how physicians were trained.And Morton played a big role in that history within Philadelphia.
In 2019, a few years after that student first asked Paul about the African skulls, he and a group of Penn students reported their findings at public meetings.
And Paul paid special attention to the Morton collection, evidence of racism that wasn't just buried in Penn's DNA, but was literally staring students in the face from behind glass cabinets every day.
A local activist was there, and they were outraged.And they spoke up about it.
saying in effect that they could not believe that this was the case and asking why is it that they didn't know this, having been a lifelong resident of West Philadelphia.
The activists started a Change.org petition calling for the skulls to be returned to their descendants, to be repatriated.But from the official holders of the Morton Cranial Collection?Crickets.
And there was no response by the museum.There was no response in any official capacity.And that's where things stood.
But then came the summer of 2020.This is What Remains, a special series from Outside In. When I first got interested in human remains collections, I thought it was just a grotesque story about philosophy, science, and ethics.
But the more I talk to people, the more they told me that I could not understand this in the abstract.
That the place I should really be focusing on is Philadelphia, where one institution's attempt to reckon with their past has been met with anger and distrust.
I mean, this is the type of elitism and colonialism that we're fighting against, right?That outsiders dictating what should be done.
I'm going to say that academics are really fucking arrogant.We're talking about a problem that's created by their arrogance.
This is part one.No justice, no peace. For many decades, the Morton Cranial Collection has been housed at the Penn Museum.It's a world-renowned archaeology and anthropology museum on the campus of U Penn in West Philadelphia.
And in the first week of June 2020... After the murder of George Floyd, the Penn Museum, like a number of different institutions through the summer of 2020, made a statement, in this case on its social media profile.
This again is Paul Wolfe Mitchell.The Penn Museum's statement acknowledged its colonial foundations.Quote, racism has no place in our museum.We must do more.
And then in big letters posted on their Instagram feed, it said, to our black staff, students, members, visitors, and Philadelphia neighbors, we stand with you. Today, Paul is an anthropologist working in the Netherlands.
But at the time, he was still a graduate student.And the Instagram post kind of bothered his research assistant, Mar Portillo Alvarado.Mar posed a rhetorical question.
Which was, well, what does it mean if the museum says that it's standing in solidarity with the black community if there are the remains of enslaved people that it's still on display in a classroom?
Paul was like, you're right, but you don't have to convince me.Why don't you write about it for the school paper?So that's what Marr did.And this time, after George Floyd's murder, it got the museum's attention.
The museum says they'll change the mode of display.They're going to frost the glass on the collection.
But then more pressure piled on.
And then ultimately they say they'll take the remains off of display.
The campus movement to abolish the police that started in the wake of George Floyd's murder.It gave rise to a parallel demand to abolish the collection.
Then, you know, ultimately, with more and more pressure and attention, they say they will look into restitution or repatriation for the remains of enslaved people.
Less than two months after Maher's article, the Penn Museum put together a committee.Initially, their scope was limited, to decide what to do with the enslaved individuals in the Morton collection, namely the 55 skulls of Africans from Cuba.
Ever since that public meeting in 2019, it was these skulls that had been the focus of the most outrage. But Paul thought it was kind of weird that the museum was so focused on such a small number.
After all, there were 1,300 skulls in this collection, gathered without consent from grave robbers and unclaimed bodies from morgues and poorhouses.So he decided to look into it more.
And he started with archival records from another historic institution in Philadelphia, the Blockley Alms House.
To call it a hospital would be somewhat inaccurate.It was really a place of care of last resort, often for the poorest Philadelphians.There were a large number of black Philadelphians at this institution.
The people who were at the Almshouse were referred to as inmates.In many cases, these individuals would not be able to voluntarily leave.
The Blockley-Almshouse was one of the first government-sponsored poorhouses in the country.It had several wings.There was a hospital, an orphanage, an insane asylum.It was also known among patients as a hotspot for grave robbing.
To be buried there was to risk being dug up and dissected by medical students.And it just so happens that Samuel Morton worked at the Blockley-Almshouse as a physician.
He was the physician of a number of people who were were dying in that period.And then at that same period, skulls are ending up in his collection.
Whether he was just following standard practices and handling human remains, or because he just didn't care, Morton rarely put any personal details in his so-called Catalog of Skulls.
And what that means is that it's hard for us to know who these people once were.All we know, in many cases, is what their race was, or at least what race Morton labeled them.
But, by cross-referencing notes from the Blockley almshouse with Morton's catalog of skulls, Paul was able to identify 14 skulls.He was confident that these 14 skulls belonged to Black men and women who died at the almshouse.
In theory, they weren't enslaved when they died.But before that?Who knows.
We don't know if they were born in Georgia or in Virginia or in North Carolina.We don't know if they were enslaved at any point in their lifetime.
And so Paul was like, if Penn's committee was addressing what to do with enslaved people, why are they just focusing on the skulls from Cuba?What about the skulls of black Philadelphians?
That was the big point.Beyond the specific numbers, that was the big point.
Well, you know, history might not repeat itself, but as Mark Twain has said, it does rhyme.And knowing what the past is and what the past has to teach us is important for informing our path forward.
This is Christopher Woods.Chris became the director of the Penn Museum in April of 2021.And it certainly wasn't the Morton collection that attracted him here.
My Institute of Chicago is specifically devoted to the ancient Middle East.That's my fields, of course, but here the collection is global in scope.The research is global in scope.So it was a real opportunity to expand my horizons.
When Chris started his job, he was the first Black director of the Penn Museum.And it was barely a year since George Floyd's murder.Barely a year since the first demands were made to repatriate the Morton Collection.
You know, it's not lost on me that you're the first black director of the Penn Museum.And this problem that you're dealing with was created essentially by racist white people to begin with.
And I wonder how you feel about the fact that you, a black man, are the one stuck with cleaning up their mess.Have you thought about this?
Well, I don't look at it as being stuck with it, but it gives me resolve to see these issues through.
The pressure was on.Chris was only on the job for three days when an op-ed in the Philly Enquirer called once again for the museum to repatriate the collection.It was written by an activist named Abdul Ali Mohamed.They just go by Ali.
And you're going to hear their name a lot.That's because from the beginning, Ali has played a huge role in putting the pressure on Penn.They were the one at those public meetings in 2019.
they could not believe that this was the case and asking why is it that they didn't know this.
They've been quoted in the news.They started a Change.org petition.
And during the first week of Chris's new job, they were among the dozens of protesters who gathered outside the museum holding signs that said, return the remains and abolish the collection. Like I said, the pressure was on.
And it was at this time that the museum, under Chris's guidance, decided to go all in.Instead of just repatriating the skulls of formerly enslaved men and women, they committed to repatriating the entire collection.All 1,300 skulls.
But that led to another question.Which skulls would they start with?
Well, this was a decision that I made literally on my first days on the job.The individuals from Cuba, I knew that would be a very complicated process.
given United States relations with Cuba, and then maybe these individuals really should probably go back to West Africa, but where?We don't know where they're from.It's a very complicated process.It would involve international agreements.
There isn't a manual for doing this kind of work. On the other hand, the issue of the black Philadelphians, this was one of tremendous sensitivity here in Philadelphia.
It was visceral and it made sense to me to deal with, to address the black Philadelphians first.
Chris's work started with a public apology from the museum.Quote, it is time for these individuals to be returned to their ancestral communities wherever possible as a step toward atonement and repair, unquote.
The museum said it wanted fundamental community involvement.So Chris promised to form another committee to understand how the local black community wanted to see the black Philadelphians from the Morton collection laid to rest.
In theory, Ali and other activists thought this was a step in the right direction.Until, that is, they found out that Penn was hiding another skeleton in its closet.
Why?How can we make sense of this?Why would anybody do that?How could anybody do that?
That's after the break. I said at the beginning of the episode that this story can't be told in the abstract.Context matters.And what I mean by that is that repatriation is an act of repair.It requires trust and buy-in.
And Penn's relationship with the black community in West Philadelphia has not been that great. In the 1950s, the university pushed out the residents of a tight-knit black neighborhood to expand Penn's footprint.
People referred to the process as pentrification.
Their 20-plus billion dollar endowment and their reputation as a premier medical school, these things might impress future students, but they can divide the communities that actually surround the school.
All of which is to say, Penn did not have everybody's trust or buy-in when they formally apologized for the Morton Cranial Collection in 2021.Which is why, just a week after the apology, it was a big deal that some additional news broke.
Last week, the University of Pennsylvania came under fire after it was revealed that the remains of children who were killed in the MOVE bombing have been sitting in a museum for years.
To understand what this was all about, we have to go back to 1985.Back then, a controversial group named MOVE was headquartered in a home in a mostly Black middle-class neighborhood of West Philadelphia, just a 10-minute drive from the university.
MOVE is a really hard group to categorize.At the time, they were this kind of black, anti-technology, back-to-the-land commune.All the members took the founder's last name, Africa.And they were armed.
Several MOVE members had been jailed after a shootout with police left one officer dead.And for over a year, they blasted their demands that they be released with a bullhorn through all hours of the day and night.
They also just yelled straight obscenities terrorizing the neighborhood. Their neighbors complained to the city.But nothing changed.And then MOVE built a fortified bunker on the roof, with holes that were gun ports.
Don't forget, this is in the middle of a residential street.Never mind that the property reportedly had these open compost piles with food scraps and human waste that attracted pests.Now there could be guns pointed down at you.
But none of this is to excuse what happened next, when the first black mayor of Philadelphia finally stepped in to do something.On May 13th, 1985, a day after Mother's Day, the city's efforts to evict MOVE turned into a dramatic day-long standoff.
Tremendous bursts of gunfire have rang out in the area of the 6200 block of Osage Avenue,
Nearly 500 police officers in SWAT gear descended on the row house where MOVE was bunkered down.When they refused to come out, police shot tear gas and over 10,000 rounds of ammunition.
At City Hall this afternoon, Mayor Good appeared publicly for the first time since the siege began.Good said he's committed to removing MOVE from the structure.
We intend to evict from the house.We intend to evacuate from the house.We intend to seize control of the house. We will do it by any means necessary.
None of it got the MOVE members to budge.So the police commissioner decided to drop a bomb on the roof from a helicopter.
It's been a huge explosion here.We don't know what it means, but it just shook the whole place.Debris flew all over the place.I don't know what that explosion was.
We heard the loud explosion.The house kind of shook.
This is Ramona Africa, a MOVE member who was in the house the day of the bombing, giving an interview to Democracy Now!The explosion ignited a fire.Ramona says it got really hot in the house, and the smoke was getting thicker.
At first, we thought it was tear gas, but as it got thicker, it became clear that this wasn't tear gas, that this was something else, and realized that our home was on fire.
The police commissioner called off the fire department, hoping to drive out the MOVE members.Let the fire burn, he said.The fire got out of control.
It spread from the MOVE house to the homes of the neighbors who were originally complaining about them.All the neighbors were safely evacuated for the day.But in the end, 61 homes burned to the ground, and only two MOVE members made it out alive.
Six adults and five children were killed. We could spend a whole episode just talking about the Move bombing and its traumatic legacy in Philadelphia, but I'm going to focus on what happened to the victims' remains.
The medical examiner's office was responsible for identifying the bodies, but almost nothing was left of them in the rubble but their bones.And there were two sets of bones the lead examiner really struggled to identify.
So he enlisted a Penn Museum paleoanthropologist to help.And according to him, the approximate ages of these two sets of bone fragments did not match any of the known victims.
In the end, the city of Philadelphia hired a special commission with nationally renowned experts.
They took over the investigation, and they determined those two sets of remains belonged to two children in the move, 14-year-old Katrisha and 12-year-old Delisha.
After the official finding, the remains of the bombing victims were returned to their families.Or at least, that's what the families thought. The remains that Katrisha's family buried were a pair of her jeans and some of her soft tissue.
But her bones?Unbeknownst to their families, the medical examiner held onto all of Katrisha's bones and some of Delisha's.Why?The medical examiner just didn't buy the commission's official findings.
He was seemingly obsessed that they could someday prove this theory that these bones belonged to someone else. He even mailed them to the Smithsonian for another opinion, and they mailed them back.
And from there, he gave them to that Penn Museum anthropologist who reportedly stored them in a cabinet in his office. Fast forward more than three decades.That Penn Museum anthropologist has long since left Penn.
And those move-bombing remains, they turn up again out of all places in an online class video.
There was a lot of, obviously, extreme distress upon learning that these children's remains were in the museum, that they'd been used in a Coursera video and all these things.And a lot of people were asking, Why, right?How can we make sense of this?
How, why would anybody do that?How could anybody do that?
This is Lyra Montero.She's an anthropological archaeologist and another vocal critic of the Penn Museum.
And at the same time, frankly, a lot of people who weren't from Billy were also learning for the first time about the mood bombing, which is also a big, oh my God, why?How could anybody do, you know, how could a city do this?
Keep in mind, these were children who still had living family members that remember them.Mothers, a brother, a sister.And they had no idea that they were being used as educational props at the Penn Museum.
Janet Monge was the curator in charge of human remains at the museum, and she was also the instructor who taught the class. According to Janet, this was still a cold case.These move bones hadn't been successfully identified yet.
To her, they were appropriate for the class because the class was about restoring lost personhood.But that is not how the public saw it when a freelance reporter who used to work for the Penn Museum broke the news.
In the shadow of the Penn Museum tonight, voices of anger and frustration.
They lack humanity.They have no respect for us, living or dead.
So we are here today, right now, to say that we want peace. to be held accountable for what they did to our families.
The protesters then marched to the office of Penn's president.The Penn Museum told NBC10 that reuniting the remains with MOVE family members is our goal.
Williams director Chris Woods has personally reached out to the Africa family and their ongoing conversations will help us understand the family's wishes as we work towards a respectful resolution.
There is so much we could get into here.What's happened since this revelation has been the subject of extensive reports by three different law firms and a very thorough investigation by the New York Times.
But let me just say that these reports focus mostly on individuals, like the original medical examiner and the pananthropologists, and Janet Monge, who used the remains in her class.
But what they don't address is the academic culture that allowed these remains to be kept in a museum for so long in the first place.
A culture of ownership, where scientists believe they have ultimate authority over remains that they think are important.These bones that were kept in boxes, displayed as props, used in videos.
Some say that they're a continuation of those old 19th century ideas, where human remains are just objects for science. There are lots of stories that speak to this mindset.
For years, a box in Penn Museum storage contained a set of human remains with no identifying documentation whatsoever.
And then in 2014, an effort to digitize records revealed that it was a 6,000-year-old skeleton that was dug up by archaeologists in Iraq back in the 1920s.All this to say, science has not traditionally treated human remains with much reverence.
Janet Monge, the woman who used the Move remains in her class as educational props, she was let go.She's now suing the university, media outlets, and virtually all of the people featured in this episode for defamation.
As for the Penn Museum, they apologized for keeping the remains and handed them back over to Move.But over the next couple of years, new information has continued to cast doubt on whether the issue is really closed.
Janet Monge lied to us about the vote she kept.The University of Penn Director of Penn Museum Christopher Woods and the Tucker Law Group allowed that lie to persist since the revelations of the retention surfaced in 2021.
This is Ali speaking at a press conference outside the museum last year.Lyra Montero was there too.And when Ali finished speaking, the two of them entered the museum and they confronted Director Chris Woods.
They showed him what they said was photographic evidence of additional move remains that hadn't been returned, taken from the museum's old defunct Flickr site.
And his response was, how do I know those are move remains?All I see is Janet with a bunch of bones.
But the official position from the museum is that they don't have any more remains from the MOVE bombing.Here's Chris.
Those remains remained here far, far, far too long.And we returned all known MOVE remains to the Africa family.MOVE remains should not be in the museum.And to our knowledge, they aren't.
So we started this episode talking about the Morton Cranial Collection.Remember that?
The one that Samuel Morton filled with lead shot and seeds to try to prove his racist theories, and that Chris Woods had promised to repatriate after pressure from the public?
So what, if anything, did the move remains have to do with the Morton Cranial Collection? Do you see the move remains and the Morton remains to be connected issues?No, they're not connected issues.
Chris says that the only thing connecting them was that they both happened to be housed within the museum.But he says even that fact is incidental.
The MOVE remains were never part of the collection.
These were researchers in the 1980s who were trying to identify these individuals and who were working on behalf of the city, independent of the museum, independent of the university, to help identify these individuals.
But like I said, context matters.And to some in the local community, these issues are definitely connected.The handling of the move remains was a huge erosion of trust.
If Chris can't be trusted with the remains of children from the move bombing, how can he be trusted with the repatriation of the Morton cranial collection?This is not the work that the museum has a right to do.
Trust in our scientific institutions, like museums and universities, it is shifting in big ways.
We're talking about a problem that's created by white supremacy, by colonialism over centuries and generations.
As a society, we've entrusted scientists to steward our questions about how to move forward.But should we?
For people who are alive now, who've made their career and made a living out of the exploitation of other people's ancestors, to even think that they get to have a say in what happens?To me, that's really fucked up.
That's next time, in our final episode of What Remains. If you want to learn more about the MOVE bombing and the subsequent handling of the MOVE remains, check out our show notes.
We've put links there to the New York Times investigation and other reports, as well as additional reading about the Penn and Slavery Project and the Morton Cranial Collection.
Archival tape from the MOVE bombing in this episode was from the documentary Let the Fire Burn, and from Democracy Now! This episode was reported and produced by me, Felix Poon.
It was edited by Taylor Quimby, with additional editing help from Rebecca Lavoie, Nate Hedgie, Kate Culinary, Jason Moon, Daniela Ali, Todd Bookman, Justine Paradise, Marina Henke, and Kate Dario.Nate Hedgie is the host of Outside In.
Taylor Quimby is our executive producer.Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR's director of on-demand audio. Special thanks to Buffy Gorilla.Music in this episode is from Lennon Hutton and Blue Dot Sessions.
The theme music for the What Remains miniseries is by Lennon Hutton.Outside In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
Hey, it's Jason again.Thanks for listening to part one of What Remains, a special series from Outside In at New Hampshire Public Radio.To hear part two and a really fascinating prologue, open your favorite podcast app and subscribe to Outside In.
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