Ivy League university set to rebury skulls of Black people kept for centuries

The University of Pennsylvania is moving ahead with the reburial of the cranial remains of at least 13 Black Philadelphians whose skulls have been kept for almost two centuries in a notorious anthropological collection used to justify white supremacy in the run-up to the US civil war.

Samuel George Morton, an anatomy professor at Penn medical school, amassed about 900 skulls, some of which came from enslaved people, in the 1830s and 1840s. After his death in 1851, skulls continued to be sent to the collection from all over the US and the world, swelling its inventory possibly to as many as 1,700 skulls which are currently stored in the physical anthropology section of Penn Museum.

The professor meticulously catalogued the skulls, numbering them and labelling them according to ethnicity. He set out to prove his belief in racial differences by measuring the internal capacity of the crania, pouring white pepper seed and later iron shot into the cavities.

He then calculated the quantity of material needed to fill each skull and converted it into cubic inches, from which he attained what he presented as the average brain size for each racial group. Caucasians, he concluded, had the largest brains and Ethiopians the smallest.

The findings were weaponized by southern white supremacists as evidence of the intrinsic intellectual, moral and physical inferiority of Black people and used to bolster arguments for retaining slavery.

In Europe, institutions which will be watching the Penn events intensely given their own collections include the Museum of Man in Paris, the National Anthropology Museum in Berlin, and the British Museum and the Natural History Museum in London.

An especially macabre element of this history is that Morton, who practiced as a doctor at the almshouse, would have known personally some of the individuals whose skulls he collected.

The university told the Guardian that given the complexity of the Morton Collection, with crania having come from all parts of the world and some skulls dating back to ancient Egyptian times, they were treating the skulls in smaller sub-groups not as a single unit. Following reburial of the 13 remains, the university plans to address the return of the 53 crania of enslaved people to Cuba.