Decades After Police Bombing, Philadelphians âSickenedâ by Handling of Victimâs Bones
The disclosure that anthropologists at two Ivy League universities had kept bones from a victim of the 1985 MOVE bombing infuriated its members as well as city leaders.
The police, firefighters and workers searching the rubble on Osage Avenue after the police bombing that killed 11 people and destroyed dozens of homes.Credit.George Widman/Associated Press
April 24, 2021, 9:06 a.m. ET
In the early evening of May 13, 1985, the police flew a helicopter over a crowded West Philadelphia neighborhood and dropped a bomb on the rowhouse where members of the communal, anti-government group MOVE lived.
The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia. Courtesy of the Penn Museum.
The University of Pennsylvania has announced plans to repatriate a group of human skulls, some of which belonged to enslaved peoples, that were unethically collected by a 19th-century scientist to support his white supremacist views.
Some 1,300 crania of various ages are included in the Penn Museum’s Morton Collection, named after the Philadelphia-based physician who amassed them, Samuel Morton.
In 2019, a group of students at the university discovered that 53 skulls in the collection came from individuals enslaved in Havana, Cuba, while two others belonged to enslaved Americans in Philadelphia.