Bones of Black Children Killed by Police Used as Teaching Tool in Princeton Course
On 4/23/21 at 8:17 AM EDT
The bones of at least one and possibly two Black children killed in a police bombing in 1985 have been in the custody of two universities for decades as a teaching tool and are now apparently missing.
Philadelphia police dropped a bomb from a helicopter onto a residential home occupied by members of MOVE, a Black liberation organization, on May 13, 1985, killing eleven people, including five children from the ages of 7 to 14. All members of MOVE take Africa as their surname.
It has now emerged that children s bones recovered from the scene were placed in the custody of Alan Mann, who was then a professor at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and who analyzed the bones at the request of Philadelphia Medical Examiner s Office, according to local outlet Billy Penn, which first reported the matter.
A celebration of Black artists and revolutionaries, Ephraim Asili s debut feature was inspired by Godard s La Chinoise.
Ephraim Asili calls his first feature-length film a remix of
La Chinoise, Jean-Luc Godard s 1967 mélange of Maoist politics among idealistic young Parisians. With energy and wit, he achieves his goal of creating a critique and an homage at the same time, but you don t need to be familiar with the earlier work to appreciate
The Inheritance. It stands solidly on its own as a dynamic inquiry into revolutionary culture and Black identity, not to mention the challenge of living with roommates.
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What might a collectively authored Black future look like? For creative polymath Ephraim Asili, it is one that knows its past as well as its present.
With his feature-length debut film “The Inheritance,” the West Philadelphia-raised, New York-based filmmaker presents a reflectively avant-garde portrait of the connective threads between community making, historical archives and political awakening. Shaping an easy bricolage of what Asili refers to as a “speculative reenactment” of his time spent living in a Black radical collective, the Black Arts Movement, and the MOVE Black liberation group, “The Inheritance”
resists convention in its easeful movements between documentary, fictive narrative and cultural archaeology.