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  • 7 months ago
Skulls of 19 African Americans returned to New Orleans after 140 years

More than a century after their remains were taken and sent overseas for racist scientific study, 19 African Americans are finally coming home

READ MORE : http://www.africanews.com/2025/06/01/skulls-of-19-african-americans-returned-to-new-orleans-after-140-years

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Transcript
00:00More than a century after their remains were taken and sent overseas for racist scientific study,
00:0719 African Americans are finally coming home.
00:10Their skulls were shipped from New Orleans to Germany in the late 1800s,
00:14part of a now discredited field of research known as phrenology.
00:19It is a demonstration of our own morality here in New Orleans
00:26and in Leipzig with the professors there who wanted to do something to restore the dignity of these people.
00:36Dr Henry D. Schmidt, a New Orleans physician, sent the skulls to Leipzig in the 1800s.
00:42At the time, researchers claimed skull shape could reveal personality traits.
00:47There was a belief at the time that science, through the study of a person's skull,
00:53could determine a person's personality, their character.
00:59Sounds pseudoscience to me.
01:03Also, their inferiority to others and I'm sure to non-marginalized people in different places.
01:11And to think that this would happen to African descended people is not unusual
01:20because we have enough scholarship which says that all kinds of experiments were done on black bodies living and dead.
01:30It's an old and ancient institution.
01:33Now with their dignity restored, the 19 have been honoured with a just funeral in New Orleans.
01:39New Orleans.
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