When Black History Is Unearthed, Who Gets to Speak for the Dead? – The New Yorker

Hes got a slightly different notion of what a descendant community might be. I looked out at the sea of people that were there, he said. This country is rooted in the story of enslaved people. This is everyones history. You can be a cynic about all of this, Reaves admitted. Its one thing to pray for the dead; its another to look after the living. But Reaves isnt cynical. Its a door, he said. You open it, some of them will walk through. The question is what lies on the other side.

God has no children whose rights may be safely trampled on.

Frederick Douglass, 1854.

Samuel Morton, a Philadelphia doctor, began collecting skulls in 1830. Determined to study the craniums of the worlds five newly classified races, he directed faraway correspondents to dig up graves and ship him heads, eventually amassing nearly nine hundred, including, closer to home, those of fourteen Black Philadelphians. Morton is buried in Philadelphias Laurel Hill Cemetery, under an obelisk inscribed, Wherever Truth Is Loved or Science Honored, His Name Will Be Revered. In 1854, three years after Mortons death, Frederick Douglass called his work scientific moonshine, but it took more than a century for scientists to disavow the notion of biological race. And yet calls for the return of those remains rest on a notion of race, too.

Christopher Woods, a Sumerologist from the University of Chicago, is the first Black director of the Penn Museum, in Philadelphia. In April, not yet two weeks after he began his appointment, the museum issued a statement apologizing for the unethical possession of human remains in the Morton Collection and pledging to return them to their ancestral communities. Penn is not alone. In January, the president of Harvard issued a similar apology and charged a committee to inventory the human remains found in its museums, with priority given to those of individuals of African descent who were or were likely to have been alive during the period of American enslavement. As Evelynn Hammonds, a historian of science who chairs the Harvard committee, told me, No one institution can solve all these questions alone.

But Penn has other problems. Days after Woodss first apology, the museum issued another one, this time for holding on to the remains of a Black child killed by police in 1985 during a raid against the Black-liberation organization MOVE. (The police bombed the MOVE house, and eleven people, including five children, were burned to death.) The museum returned those remains to the families this summer. As for the rest of the remains, including the Morton collection, We want to do the right thing, Woods told me. We want to be able to repatriate individuals when descendant communities want that to be done.

During the years when Morton was collecting skulls, much of Philadelphias African American community was burying its dead in a cemetery on Queen Street thats now a playground called Weccacoe, for a Lenni Lenape word that means peaceful place. The day I stopped there, the playground was a tumble of sippy cups and strollers, water buckets and tubes of sunscreen, and toddlers playing pirates. Underneath lie thousands of graves.

Pennsylvania passed a gradual abolition law in 1780, and by the seventeen-nineties Philadelphia had a thriving free Black community, much of it centered on what is now the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1810, the Bethel church trustees and the A.M.E.s founder, Richard Allen, bought a city block on Queen Street. Until 1864, the congregation used the land as a burial ground and then, in 1889, strapped for cash, sold it to cover the cost of a new church. The burial ground became a park, and then a playground. Nearly half the citys population is Black, but the citys monuments and museums mostly commemorate Benjamin Franklin, the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, and the drafting of the Constitution. Avenging the Ancestors, a coalition formed in 2002 to advocate for a slavery memorial in the city, has taken a broad view of the notion of a descendant community, describing its members as todays free Black sons and daughters of yesterdays enslaved Black fathers and mothers.

In 2010, Terry Buckalew, an independent researcher and aging antiwar activist, read in the newspaper that the city was about to renovate Weccacoe. They were going to dig it up, he told me. They were going to put in new trees, new light poles, and a sprinkler. And I said, Oh, no. The bodies are still there! Three years later, the city conducted a ground-penetrating-radar survey and concluded that the site, the Bethel Burying Ground, contained at least five thousand bodies. Buckalew, who is white, has spent his retirement researching the lives of those thousands of Black Philadelphians. I asked him why. Reparations, he said. I firmly believe in reparations.

Reparations rest on arguments about inheritance and descent. But, if genealogy has a new politics, it has always been urgent. After Emancipation, people put ads in newspapers, desperately looking for their children, husbands, wives, and parents. INFORMATION WANTED of my mother, Lucy Smith, of Hopkinsville, Ky., formerly the slave of Dr. Smith. She was sold to a Mr. Jenks of Louisiana, Ephraim Allen of Philadelphia posted in the Christian Recorder in 1868. Today, reparative genealogical projects in search of descendants put out calls on social media and ask people to fill out Google Forms. One of the most successful, the Georgetown Memory Project, has been looking for direct descendants of two hundred and seventy-two enslaved people sold by the Jesuit Society that ran Georgetown in 1838, mostly to pay off debts. So far, the project, in conjunction with independent researchers and American Ancestors (the nations oldest genealogical research organization, which established pedigrees for Mayflower descendants), has located more than eight thousand descendants. In 2019, after a student-driven referendum, the university announced a plan to provide four hundred thousand dollars a year in reparations, in the form of community-based projects to benefit Descendant communities.

Reparations hasnt been the dominant note sounded in Philadelphia over Bethel, perhaps in part because it was the A.M.E. Church that sold the burial ground. Still, theres been plenty of controversy, along with the usual and more than usual delays of a complicated city-planning process. But last year the Bethel Burying Ground Historic Site Memorial Committee selected a proposal by the award-winning artist Karyn Olivier, for a memorial titled Her Luxuriant Soil.

Olivier, who teaches sculpture at Temple University, was born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1968. My ancestors were slaves, but not here, she told me. Olivier likes to work with soil: It holds history and holds loss and holds pain. But she took her title from a speech made by Richard Allen in 1817, before a meeting of three thousand free men of African heritage, whod gathered to debate a proposal, mostly favored by Southern slaveowners, for resettling free Black men and women in West Africa. Whereas our ancestors (not of choice) were the first cultivators of the wilds of America, Allen said, we their descendants feel ourselves entitled to participate in the blessings of her luxuriant soil.

Oliviers elegiac design incorporates features discovered during excavation of the site, including the inscription found on the only headstone that was unearthed: Amelia Brown, 1819, Aged 26 years. Whosoever live and believeth in me, though we be dead, yet, shall we live. A wrought-iron cemetery gate reading Bethel Burying Ground will mark the entrance to the parkhalf of which will still be a playgroundwhere paving stones engraved with epitaphs will have something of the quality of Germanys Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones, marked with the names of those who were killed in the Holocaust. You wont trip over Oliviers installation; instead, inscribed into water-activated concrete, the words will appear, and disappear, with rain, snow, and a sprinkler system. The plan is to break ground in March. But it wont be very broken: the graves lie only inches deep.

View original post here:

When Black History Is Unearthed, Who Gets to Speak for the Dead? - The New Yorker