The bones of a victim in Philadelphia's 1985 MOVE bombing were shelved away for decades, shuttled between academics at Ivy League schools and used in videos for an online college course.
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Carl E. Singley works at Tucker Law Group, considered the region’s largest Black-owned firm.
Protesters demonstrated this week outside Penn Museum over the handling of the recently revealed MOVE remains Kimberly Paynter / WHYY Apr. 30, 2021, 7:45 a.m. Love Philly? Sign up for the free Billy Penn newsletter to get everything you need to know about Philadelphia, every day.
A week after news broke that the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University held, studied, boxed and shelved human remains identified as children killed in the 1985 MOVE bombing, UPenn has launched an internal investigation led by Black-owned Tucker Law Group.
In a 2019 video tutorial produced by Princeton, students watched the smiling white anthropologist Janet Monge and a University of Pennsylvania undergraduate hold a human pelvic bone and a femur up to the camera as rows of human skulls, backlit and neatly lined up in wooden cabinets, rested behind them. The bones the two held, transferred between universities over decades, likely belong to Delisha Africa and Katricia “Tree” Africa, two Black children killed in the 1985 MOVE bombing, in which the city of Philadelphia dropped a satchel bomb on a row house occupied by the Black liberation group after a police standoff. Released soon after the bombing to a professor at the University of Pennsylvania for forensic study, the remains will finally be collected from that professor’s home on Friday. How they ended up there, and where they’ve been in between, is something the institutions involved have struggled to explain.