19 Black Americans’ skulls returned to New Orleans after 150 years for memorial service

The city of New Orleans, Dillard University and other agencies to give them a proper memorial service on Saturday.

More than 150 years after their heads were severed from their bodies and shipped to Germany for “research,” the craniums of 19 Black people, which were recently returned, will be memorialized Saturday during a sacred ceremony in New Orleans.

Dillard University President Monique Guillory said at a news conference Wednesday that the memorial will be “about confronting a dark chapter in medical and scientific history while choosing a path of justice, honor and remembrance.”

Those who will be honored died in the city’s Charity Hospital in 1872. Their heads were severed and shipped to Leipzig University in Germany to be studied — a common practice at the time, as researchers sought to confirm their unfounded theory that Black people’s brains were smaller than those of other races, therefore making them inferior.