Underneath oak trees and Spanish moss from Texas to the Carolina coasts, the remains of Black Americans lay in unmarked graves across roadside cemeteries and backyards.
While some graves now remain hidden beneath highways and shopping malls, others have been stripped of their dignity in an even more insidious way. Nowhere is this more painfully clear than in New Orleans, where the remains of 19 Black men and women, once spirited away across the ocean in the name of racist science, have finally come home.
For 150 years, their remains languished in a German vault, until, at last, they were brought home in May and honored with a jazz funeral this past weekend and interred in the city that once denied them peace in both life and death.
Their journey reveals the depths of exploitation endured by Black Americans, and the current movement to restore what was lost, name by name, soul by soul, said Eva Baham, a historian from Dillard University in New Orleans who led the cultural repatriation committee to bring the remains back to the U.S.
Between December 1871 and January 1872, 19 people checked themselves into Charity Hospital in New Orleans. They were ordinary people whose final indignity came not in death, but in what followed.
There was Marie Louise, who died of malnutrition, her life ending quietly in a city she had always called home. Hiram Malone, just 21, succumbed to pneumonia far from the Alabama soil where he was born. Samuel Prince, a cook of 40 years, lost his battle with tuberculosis, and William Roberts, a 23-year-old man from Georgia, died from diarrhea.
Their skulls were severed and shipped across the Atlantic, cataloged as “specimens” in a German university, as the pseudoscience of phrenology took root across the globe. The theories claimed there were connections between someone’s intellect — and morality — with the size and shape of their skull. It was used to proliferate the false idea that Black and brown people were inferior to white people.
The skulls’ return to the U.S. is believed to be the first major international restitution of the remains of Black Americans from Europe.
The homecoming is a reckoning with the relentless cycle of exploitation, dispossession, and erasure that has defined Black existence in America, advocates behind the initiative explained.
“This moment calls us to bear witness to a painful chapter in our collective history while recognizing the unique role our institution plays in preserving the dignity and legacy of those who were wrongfully taken,” said Monique Guillory, president of Dillard University, where the funeral service was held. “This is more than an act of remembrance — it is a restoration of humanity.”
From the theft of bodies for pseudoscience to the plundering of land and the forced migrations that have scattered families and severed roots, Black Americans have repeatedly been ripped from the places and people that ground them, Baham said. The loss is ongoing and dictating the shape of modern life, from the continued struggle for agency over one’s body in the health care system to the demand for restitution and remembrance from the institutions that exacerbate racial inequality in the country.
“These people’s lives had meaning,” Baham said during the memorial.
“History is not to wallow in, or wind about. It is to build on. It is to move forward. And when we keep our past hidden, we’re starting over every day,” she added.
In 2023, the University of Leipzig in Germany reached out to New Orleans’ city archaeologist, acknowledging that the skulls in their collection had been acquired in a “colonial context and unethically.” What followed was a two-year journey of coordination between city officials, state agencies, and academic partners.
Researchers believe many of the 19 victims had once been enslaved, later moving freely in the uncertain years after the Civil War, only to fall ill or be institutionalized before dying at Charity Hospital. The hospital, which was abandoned after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, was one of America’s oldest hospitals known to care for Black and poor people. Over the past two years, Baham’s team has pieced together glimpses into their lives: 13 men and four women, with two still unnamed. The committee tried for two years to contact descendants of the victims, but had no success.
At the memorial, a group of Dillard students read from the little info collected from hospital and census records, ending with the final chapter of their journey.
“Another voyage across the Atlantic, passing bones of enslaved Africans on the ocean floor,” the students’ said. “From Africa, to the Caribbean, to the United States of America; from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Leipzig, Germany; from Leipzig, Germany to New Orleans, Louisiana — justice carries 19 men and women home. May they walk freely in the city of God, in dignity and in honor.”
You can watch the memorial in full here.
