May 30, 2025
The severed heads of 19 Black Americans, used for “research” in 1872, have been returned to New Orleans, where they will be honored in a memorial ceremony.
The craniums of 19 Black Americans, whose heads were severed and sent to Germany for “research” in 1872, are being returned to New Orleans for a memorial service.
The city of New Orleans, in partnership with University Medical Center New Orleans, Dillard University, and other organizations, will hold a sacred ceremony on May 31 to honor the 19 skulls, NBC News reports.
The memorial comes one week after the remains were returned to the city, concluding a two-year repatriation effort.
The ceremony will be “about confronting a dark chapter in medical and scientific history while choosing a path of justice, honor, and remembrance,” said Dillard University President Monique Guillory.
The individuals being honored died at Charity Hospital in New Orleans in 1872, after which their heads were severed and sent to Leipzig University in Germany for research. It was a common and deeply racist practice at the time that was driven by the false belief that Black people had smaller brains and were, therefore, intellectually inferior.
“They were stripped of their dignity,” Guillory said, over “a practice rooted in racism and exploitation. They were people with names. They were people with stories and histories. Some of them had families, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, human beings.”
The heads were returned after officials from Leipzig University reached out to the city of New Orleans in 2023, revealing that the remains were part of the university’s 19th-century skull collection. As part of an ongoing effort to repatriate human remains, the school began returning skulls to their places of origin.
After being notified, retired Dillard University professor Eva Baham led the Cultural Repatriation Committee to recover the skulls and oversee plans for their proper memorial.
“We are not talking about them as if they are skeletal remains,” Baham said. “We want to honor them by calling them the individuals that they are.”
Those who will be memorialized are Adam Grant, Isaak Bell, Hiram Smith, William Pierson, Henry Williams, John Brown, Hiram Malone, William Roberts, Alice Brown, Prescilla Hatchet, Marie Louise, Mahala, Samuel Prince, John Tolman, Henry Allen, Moses Willis, and Henry Anderson. Two people could not be identified.
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