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Philadelphia’s racist past resurfaced in recent weeks, with the public disclosure that the bones of one or two African American children killed by the city’s police in 1985 were being used in an online Princeton University course, “Real Bones: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology,” without the knowledge of their families.
May 13th marks the 36th anniversary of the day the city of Philadelphia bombed its own citizens. On that day in 1985, police surrounded the home of MOVE, a radical Black liberation organization that was defying orders to vacate. Police flooded the home with water, filled the house with tear gas, and blasted the house with automatic weapons, all failing to dislodge the residents. Finally, police dropped a bomb on the house from a helicopter, killing eleven people: six adults and five children. The fire burned an entire city block to the ground, destroying over sixty homes.
Final Call News
From left: Carlos Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Consuwella Africa, Eddie Africa. Photos: Michael Z. Muhammad
PHILADELPHIA Last year the Philadelphia City Council formally apologized for the May 13, 1985 police bombing, which killed six adults and five children and decimated 60 homes. Painful memories of the attack and other injustices perpetrated on the MOVE organization resurfaced recently, pulling a scab off an open wound when the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University acknowledged that for the past 36 years, anthropologists have been using the bones of Tree Africa, 14 and Delicia Africa, 12.
Abdul Aliy Muhammad
Both children were bombing victims and their remains are being used for a video course posted online called
Black scientists denounce racism at Penn Museum
The following excerpts are from an April 28 statement regarding the unethical, possession and callous racist use of the remains of the children of MOVE who died in the 1985 state bombing of their home in Philadelphia:
The Association of Black Anthropologists, the Society of Black Archaeologists and the Black in Bioanthropology Collective are painfully aware of the barbaric history of anthropology, especially when it comes to populations of peoples of African descent.
We know that our discipline has been mobilized to rationalize eugenics and white supremacy and to justify slavery and colonialism. . . . Ethnographic museums, like Penn’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (which houses the collection of the notorious racist Samuel Morton), have supported the academic rationale for the institutionalization of racism in anthropology textbooks, courses and curricula. (tinyurl.com/2tbb33td) . . . .
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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.