Last weekend, Dillard University held a memorial service and jazz funeral to honor 19 Black New Orleanians whose skulls were wrongfully taken from Charity Hospital and sent to Germany in the 1880s.
The ceremony shed light on the legacy of racist pseudoscience. Dr. Henry Schmidt, a New Orleans physician, is believed to have given the skulls to a German researcher studying phrenology, a discredited pseudoscience that falsely claimed skull shape could determine racial characteristics.
Dr. Eva Baham, a historian who led Dillard’s repatriation efforts in partnership with the University of Leipzig, joined Louisiana Considered managing producer Alana Schreiber on Friday to discuss what she learned about the racist study, the 19 individuals and the return of their remains.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ALANA SCHREIBER: Can you start just by telling us about what we know happened in the 1880s? How did the crania of these 19 individuals wind up in Germany? How does something like that happen?
DR. EVA BAHAM: Yes. Well, first of all, they died December 1871–17 of them — and two of them died in January 1872. There is no indication that somebody did something untoward to usher in their death, but as we know, Charity Hospital was a teaching hospital, so their bodies were probably used to teach medical students. But what is horrendous is that they were decapitated.
So, somewhere between 1872, January, and 1886 — it seems probably somewhere closer to 1886 — I'm assuming that these crania were sent to Leipzig, Germany.
SCHREIBER: How exactly were their crania studied? What was Dr. [Henry] Schmidt trying to research and why did he specifically want the skulls of Black people?
BAHAM: There was a pseudoscience called phrenology. And that study — which was not new in the 1870s, 1880s — was intended to determine, if you will, personality. There was the notion in phrenology that you can examine a person's skull to determine their personality. So we know that personality is about behavior and actions, character would be morals. I don't know how you tell that either one, from studying the skull of these individuals. This pseudoscience if you will, is a predecessor, perhaps a foundational source that was used against Jewish people in the Holocaust. So we can see some long roots in this. I often reference Thomas Jefferson, who also looked at skulls to determine personality, to determine intellect. There was no hypothesis. There was a conclusion first. And then the research was done to prove themselves right.
SCHREIBER: Definitely not how the scientific process works.
BAHAM: That's right.
SCHREIBER: Well, well, what do we know about these individuals? What have you learned in your research about who they were, the lives that they lived, and what are some of the things you're still hoping to learn about them?
BAHAM: Well, what we've learned is available, of course, from the Charity Hospital death records that are available in the public library here. So, Freddie Evans and I were charged to do that research. We were combing through the records and what we came upon would be all 19 having died, one in succession to the other. That is interesting. I think we can draw conclusions or assumptions about that there. There's nothing, as I may have mentioned, there's nothing that says there was something untoward going on here, meaning that nobody actually… we don't see that anybody killed them. They died from various things, various diseases or maladies, as it is stated in the record here of tuberculosis, of some kind of fevers of anemia and cholera. All of those things were rife among people in post-Civil War New Orleans. This would be six years out from the Civil War.
What we did find, we found detailed information about each one. Except for the two that are listed as unknown, even though they are described physically. So the descriptions of them include about how old they were, whether they were light-skinned, dark-skinned, terms that we don't use today that are derogatory, such as mulatto. How tall they were, their physical build.
But they also have some things that tell us a lot about who these people, in terms of their own intellect, they had to have answered some questions. Not only their age, but where do you live in New Orleans? Where were you born? How long have you been in New Orleans? Important because we're talking about post-Civil War with people coming from all over. And what do you do? Are you married? All those questions are answered. And then it says “date died” and what they died from.
So, Freddie Evans and I went on to look for descendants. We went to try to establish some genealogy. And of course when we first talked with the professors over in Germany — and we spent a lot of time speaking with them back and forth — one of the things they wanted to do before they released them was to determine descendants. And that's what we started. We spent last summer looking to see if we could find any information about each of them. But that proved to be very difficult.
SCHREIBER: Well, I want to know a little bit more about this partnership with the University of Leipzig. What does it look like? How have you worked together in the past two years leading up to ultimately the ceremony and the commemoration event last weekend?
BAHAM: So two years ago, Leipzig contacted the City of New Orleans, and the first contact was the city archeologist, Michael Kazinski.
He contacted Dr. Ryan Seman, Dr. Ryan Gray and Professor Christine Holland, all of whom are anthropologists. So around April a year ago, Dr. Ryan Gray from UNO. called me, on recommendation — he still won't tell me how that came about to call me, to establish a cultural repatriation committee.
So from a year ago, we were in touch, the Cultural Repatriation Committee was in touch with Dr. Dr. Martin Gericke and his associate, Ms. Mandy Wagner, who shared with us what objectives they had, if you will, they told us, even as late as last month or a month ago, that they came into this collection about three years ago. And when they did, they decided that they should do what's right for now, and what's right–they can't change the past–so what's right for now is to repatriate them.
SCHREIBER: So tell us a little bit about last weekend's event. Who was there? What did the ceremony look like? How did you honor the lives of these people?
BAHAM: What we planned in the ceremony was that we were going to have an interfaith service, and that interfaith service was designed because we did not know the faith traditions of these 19 individuals. So we thought it would be appropriate to have represented on the program the different faith traditions that exist here in New Orleans. And we had various Christian denominations, including Catholicism, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the United Methodist, the Interdenominational Christian Church, Gospel Baptist Church. And we also had with us individuals from the Jewish community. We had one individual from the Buddhist International community. We had the Baháʼí of New Orleans represented. So each one of them came to share in their own way. We didn't tell them what to say, we just said, we need words of faith. Share it from your own faith tradition. And it was absolutely beautiful.
SCHREIBER: That sounds so lovely. Well, before we go, I find it very interesting that your partner in all of this was Germany, because of course they've done quite a bit of repatriation, really over the last century as they rebuild after the Holocaust, and acknowledging racist and anti-Semitic past. So as the chair of the repatriation committee at Dillard, what do you hope to learn from a place like Germany that has this extremely clouded past and is trying to reflect and remember history while also moving forward?
BAHAM: We can't redo the past, but what we can do is attempt to make lives right for today.
I would say that it is somewhat ironic, but it does tell you how through progress, and as time marches on, that we have each new generation of thought, not just of individuals, but individuals with the thought that, we do not want to live with a dreaded past. And I need to add to that the same thing that we made a proposal to the University Medical Center whose predecessor, one of them was Charity Hospital, and we asked them for funding because this needed funding to get this done.
And their vice president of business development contacted us and said, “Yes, we know we can't remake the past, but we wanna do again, what's right for today.” So they gave us generous funding for all of what happened over the weekend, and that included, of course, the cost to bury the dead. So, I'm saying all of this to say that in everybody, in all of the past, if what we are doing today can just make sure that we make progress, we build on the past. We look back, whether it's Germany, and as an African American myself, whether it's enslavement in past people who want to come to make life better and to move forward for us today. And for posterity who say, I'm not ignoring the past, I'm learning from it.
We're all learning. And what we want to do is ensure that we don't have to live this again. So, as I said on Saturday, I am, I stand with my Jewish sisters and brothers who say, “never forget.”
