A pair of Ivy League universities apologized recently for mishandling the bones of a Black teen killed in a 1985 Philadelphia police bombing.
The child’s remains remained at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology for decades and were used as an exhibit for an online forensic anthropology class that Princeton University hosted. Neither of the prestigious schools asked for consent from the child’s surviving loved ones to use her remains for teaching and research purposes.
Both schools came under fire last week after Philadelphia news team Billy Penn broke news that the remains sat in a box at the Penn Museum and were shuffled between the two campuses before resurfacing as a “case study” in a 2019 research video.