Remains of 19 Black Americans returned to New Orleans nearly 150 years later

The remains of 19 Black Americans whose skulls were taken to Leipzig, Germany, in the 1880s to perform “racial pseudoscience” experiments, were brought to New Orleans to be properly memorialized, a repatriation committee said Thursday.

Dillard University, the City of New Orleans and University Medical Center will hold a New Orleans-style jazz funeral on Saturday morning for the 13 men, four women and two unidentified people, according to Dr. Monique Guillory, the president of the historically Black Louisiana university.

“They were people with names,” Guillory said at a press conference on Thursday. “They were people with stories and histories. Some of them had families — mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, human beings — not specimens, not numbers.”

Dr. Eva Baham, chair of Dillard University’s Cultural Repatriation Committee, said during the press conference that the University of Leipzig reached out to the City of New Orleans in 2023 and offered to repatriate the remains.

The Cultural Repatriation Committee formed in 2024 and looked through public records to identify exactly who the people were and establish a genealogy, according to Baham. The group has not been able to identify any descendants at this point, she noted.

Baham’s team located the people’s death records in the archives of Charity Hospital. The medical institution served people of all races from 1736 until it was shuttered due to severe damage from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, according to a statement from Dillard University. University Medical Center New Orleans opened in its place in 2015 and was the major funder of the project, Baham said.

Of the 19 people, 17 of them died in December 1871 and two died in January 1872, their ages ranging from 15 to 70 years old, according Baham. Many of them were not born in Louisiana but came from states like Kentucky and Tennessee. The committee discovered that 10 of the 19 people were in New Orleans for less than six years, Baham noted.

“We have people who were here in New Orleans from one hour in 1871, one day, a week, two months,” Baham said at the news conference. “I just want to remind you that the Civil War had ended in 1865, so we have 10 of these individuals who had arrived here after the American Civil War.”

The names of the 17 people that the committee was able to identify include Adam Grant, 50; Isaak Bell, 70; Hiram Smith, 23; William Pierson, 43; Henry Williams, 55; John Brown, 48; Hiram Malone, 21; William Roberts, 23; Alice Brown, 15; Prescilla Hatchet, 19; Marie Louise, 55; Mahala [no listed last name], 70; Samuel Prince, 40; John Tolman, 23; Henry Allen, 17; Moses Willis, 23; and Henry Anderson, 23.

“We can’t rewrite history,” Charlotte Parent, vice president of business development at University Medical Center, said at the press conference. “The times were what the times were at the time, but we can always look back and figure out ways that we can embrace and make things as right as we can, and this is one of those opportunities for us to do that.”