CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- An North Carolina State University professor, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, says museums and researchers should change how they treat Black people and their remains.
Ann Ross, a forensic anthropologist who has worked on many cold cases in North Carolina, teaches biological sciences at N.C. State.
She and lead author Shanna Williams at the USC School of Medicine Greenville wrote “Ethical dilemmas in skeletal collection utilization: Implications of the Black Lives Matter movement on the anatomical and anthropological sciences.” The article was published in The Anatomical Record last month.
“It’s a call to have that conversation,” Ross said in an interview. “These collections — that [forensic researchers] use a lot and have been using, you know, for training and everything — most of them were acquired by dubious means.”
In anatomical and anthropological research, skeletal remains are key in and out of the classroom. They are used for training and to study how human societies and their bodies have changed. But Ross and Williams say many of these remains have been collected without consent, in ethically dubious ways, or to advance explicitly racist anthropological theories.
“We’re at this tipping point where this discussion of race, and ancestry, and identity really has come to the forefront,” Williams said. “There’s always been those kind of rumblings, but now there’s more of a willingness to face or, perhaps more appropriately, a demand to face these types of issues.”
Repatriation and reburial
One collection exhibiting unethically sourced remains of Black and Indigenous people mentioned in the article is the Morton Cranial Collection at the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Dr. Samuel Morton assembled the collection of more than 1,300 human skulls and used them as the basis for his white supremacist anthropological research in the 19th century.
“These are very well known common skeletal collections that have a whole history that I think, even if people know passively, they never really thought about the implications,” Williams said of the Morton Collection and others.
Last year in April, after years of criticism and pressure from scientists and activists alike, the Penn Museum formally apologized and began a plan to repatriate and rebury the skulls, many of which belong to enslaved people and Black Philadelphians.
“The Penn Museum and the University of Pennsylvania apologize for the unethical possession of human remains in the Morton Collection,” Christopher Woods, the museum’s top executive, said in an April 2021 press release.
“There is no ’one size fits all’ approach to handling repatriation and reburial in any circumstance,” Woods wrote. “Each case is unique and deserves its own consideration.”
And that’s what Ross and Williams hope fellow forensic researchers will continue to ask themselves: What should be done with remains in an ethically unsound collection?
The researchers found there needs to be more collaboration between the descendants of the people whose remains are being used and the institutions using them.
“What would definitely be appropriate is a call to involve the communities,” Ross said. “They need to have a voice in how this needs to move forward.”
“If researchers aren’t asking for that collaboration, those communities [will] demand that collaboration,” Williams said.
The researchers argue that the anthropology community also has a larger obligation to engage in uncomfortable conversations and openly encourage criticism on issues related to race.
Neither Ross nor Williams knew of skeletal collections in North or South Carolina with unethically obtained remains.
Henrietta Lacks
A popularly known case of non-consensual use of remains was that of Henrietta Lacks, a poor, Black woman from Baltimore treated for cervical cancer at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Lacks’ cancer cells were obtained in a biopsy before she died in 1951 and sent to Dr. George Gey, a cancer and virus researcher. Nicknamed “HeLa” cells (from the first two letters of her first and last names), they are still used to this day to study the effects of toxins, drugs, hormones and viruses on the growth of cancer cells without experimenting on humans.
Johns Hopkins claims to have never sold or profited from the discovery or distribution of HeLa cells and does not own the rights to the HeLa cell line.
The book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” and its 2017 film adaptation tell Lacks’ and her family’s story.
