Skulls of 19 Black people once subject to racist study in Germany are laid to rest in New Orleans.

Marie Louise was a lifelong New Orleanian who died of malnutrition. Hiram Malone came to Louisiana from Alabama, hospitalized at 21 with a fatal case of pneumonia. Samuel Prince was a 40-year-old cook, who succumbed to tuberculosis.

They were among 19 Black patients who died at one New Orleans hospital in the 1870s, and whose heads were removed by a doctor to be sent to Germany. There, the crania were studied as "specimens" in what was then a proliferating pseudoscience of phrenology. It purported connections between someone's intellect or morality and the size or shape of their skull, with some doctors theorizing superiority of one race over another.

The skulls of those 19 patients have now been repatriated to Louisiana after more than a century abroad. On Saturday, they were honored in a multi-faith memorial and laid to rest in a jazz funeral rooted in New Orleans tradition.

"We can't be sure exactly where they came from. And so here, we have them. And what are we to make of what happened to them?" Eva Baham, a historian from Dillard University who led the cultural repatriation committee, said during Saturday's service. "You can be angry. You could be upset, rightly so. But we can't stay there."

The remains were returned by the University of Leipzig, which in 2023 contacted the city archeologist in New Orleans, acknowledging the skulls had been acquired in a "colonial context and unethically." The two-year return process involved city, state and academic institutions. It culminated in a notable international restitution, a return of African American remains from Europe — with many remains still lingering in archival collections across the U.S. and abroad, at museums and universities.

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