Sometime before Jan. 10, 1872, a young Black laborer named William Roberts checked himself into Charity Hospital in New Orleans. Just 23 years old, he was from Georgia and had a strong build, according to hospital records. His only recorded sickness was diarrhea.
He was one of 19 Black patients who died at the hospital in December 1871 and January 1872, and whose skulls were sent to Germany to be studied by a doctor researching a now wholly discredited science that purported a correlation between the shape and size of a skull and a person’s intellect and character.
The skulls languished in Germany for about 150 years until Leipzig University contacted the city of New Orleans two years ago to repatriate them.
They were returned to New Orleans this month, and the 19 people are being honored on Saturday morning with a jazz funeral before the skulls are interred.
While the return of human remains from museum collections has become more common, the repatriation of these 19 Black cranial remains to New Orleans is believed to be the first major international restitution of the remains of Black Americans from Europe, according to Paul Wolff Mitchell, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam who studies the 19th century history of race and science in the United States and Europe.
Dr. Wolff Mitchell wrote a report on the skulls of Black Philadelphians in a University of Pennsylvania collection that were interred last year, one of a few other instances of Black remains from a museum collection being laid to rest.
Saturday’s jazz funeral — a New Orleans Second Line, a kind of street parade to honor the dead, followed by the interment of the skulls — is the culmination of a two-year effort that required the collaboration of several New Orleans organizations and Leipzig University and cost thousands of dollars.
Michael Godzinski, New Orleans’ archaeologist, who was the first person contacted by a university staff member, said he was “blown away” when he saw the first email. It described a collection of human remains unlike any archaeological project he had encountered.
“I thought, is this a hoax?” he recalled. “I read the email five times, then thought, ‘This is a chance to bring our people home.’”
He contacted Dillard University, a local historically Black institution, because “he wanted to make sure that there was someone involved who appreciated and could consider the kind of cultural implications of repatriating African Americans from this time period in New Orleans,” Monique Guillory, Dillard’s president, said in an interview.
Dillard University set up a cultural repatriation committee to learn more about the 19 people and, most important, to work out the complicated logistics of bringing their skulls back to New Orleans and honoring them.
Leipzig University, whose researchers could not immediately be reached for comment, paid the shipping cost of about $5,000.
Researchers at Leipzig and in New Orleans were able to identify 17 of the 19 people and garner a surprising amount of information about their lives.
Many arrived in New Orleans after the Civil War, when the city was a hub for freed Black Americans — but also overcrowded and plagued with disease.
Almost 150 years ago, they fell ill — two had been institutionalized in asylums — and they all died at Charity Hospital, one of the oldest hospitals in the country until it closed after being badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
It is unclear what happened in the years between the deaths of the 19 patients in 1871 and 1872 and the 1880s, when a New Orleans doctor sent the skulls to a doctor in Germany, Emil Ludwig Schmidt, who researched the then-popular practice of phrenology.
Phrenologists at the time studied the skulls of nonwhite people in an attempt to prove that there was a correlation between the physical characteristics of their skull shape and their intelligence. The theory has been discredited.
Schmidt had a collection of about 1,300 skulls from more than 40 countries, primarily from people of African descent, that he later donated to Leipzig University. At the time, skull collections were not uncommon.
In New Orleans, the leaders of the project credited the university in Germany for recognizing the importance of repatriating the remains.
“These are Black bodies that were taken and used at will,” said Eva Baham, a historian at Dillard who led the committee. “People had no agency over themselves, and apparently, family and friends — nobody else did either.”
Museums around the world, including the Smithsonian, still retain collections of human remains and skulls.
Dr. Wolff Mitchell, the researcher at the University of Amsterdam, said that Leipzig University’s collection was “by no means the largest in the world, or even the largest in Germany,” but that it was very “representative of this period of racial science the 19th century.”
He noted that while repatriations of remains from museums and institutions are becoming more common, it was “unprecedented” to see the return of Black American remains to the care of a Black institution in the community from which those people came.
In contrast to a collection of skulls of Black people that were interred in Philadelphia in 2024, the case of the 19 skulls returned to New Orleans “is a remarkably well documented one,” Dr. Wolff Mitchell said.
Although the location of the rest of their bodies remains unknown, researchers believe they were used at Charity, which was a teaching hospital, and wound up at the Charity Hospital Cemetery.
The cemetery is now also home to a Hurricane Katrina memorial, and it is where the committee chose to bury the 19 skulls.
For the interment and memorial ceremonies, Dillard University involved University Medical Center in New Orleans, the modern iteration of Charity Hospital. The medical center provided money for the funeral home that received the remains, the jazz band and the crafting of funeral vessels.
The Dillard University committee is still considering whether to test the skulls for D.N.A. in order to identify descendants. The committee has hesitated because the process could destroy the delicate skulls.
But Dr. Baham said that the 19 wooden funeral vessels, engraved by a local artist with their names and ages, are designed so they can be unsealed — “if any person wants to find them.”
Aishvarya Kavi works in the Washington bureau of The Times, helping to cover a variety of political and national news.
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