[News] Bones of Black children killed in police bombing used in Ivy League anthropology course

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/22/move-bombing-black-children-bones-philadelphia-princeton-pennsylvania 
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/22/move-bombing-black-children-bones-philadelphia-princeton-pennsylvania> 



  Bones of Black children killed in police bombing used in Ivy League
  anthropology course

Ed Pilkington - April 23, 2021
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The bones of Black children who died in 1985 after their home was bombed 
by Philadelphia police in a confrontation with the Black liberation 
group which was raising them are being used as a “case study 
<https://www.coursera.org/lecture/real-bones-forensic-anthropology/1-1-losing-personhood-move-a-case-study-U4iBa>” 
in an online forensic anthropology course presented by an Ivy League 
professor.

It has emerged that the physical remains of one, or possibly two, of the 
children who were killed in the aerial bombing of the Move organization 
in May 1985 have been guarded over the past 36 years in the 
anthropological collections of the University of Pennsylvania 
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/pennsylvania> and Princeton.

The institutions have held on to the heavily burned fragments, and since 
2019 have been deploying them for teaching purposes without the 
permission of the deceased’s living parents.

To the astonishment and dismay of present-day Move members, some of the 
bones are being deployed as artifacts in an online course presented in 
the name of Princeton and hosted by the online study platform Coursera. 
Real Bones: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology 
<https://www.coursera.org/learn/real-bones-forensic-anthropology> 
focuses on “lost personhood” – cases where an individual cannot be 
identified due to the decomposed condition of their remains.

It uses as its main “case study” the events of May 1985, producing as 
prime evidence a set of bones belonging to a girl in her teens retrieved 
from the ashes of the Move house at 6221 Osage Avenue in Philadelphia 
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/philadelphia>.

The revelation comes just days before Philadelphia stages its first 
official day of remembrance over the 1985 bombing, following a formal 
apology issued by the city council last year.

The disclosure, first reported by the local news outlet Billy Penn 
<https://billypenn.com/2021/04/21/move-bombing-penn-museum-bones-remains-princeton-africa/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter>, 
also lands in the middle of a fevered debate over academia’s handling of 
African American remains that has been rocket-charged by the nationwide 
racial reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis 
last year by a police officer.

On 13 May 1985, Philadelphia police dropped a bomb 
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/10/move-1985-bombing-reconciliation-philadelphia> 
from a helicopter on to the roof of a communal house occupied by members 
of Move, an organization that bore comparison to the Black Panthers 
combined with back-to-nature environmental activism. In the ensuing 
inferno, the Move house as well as the entire surrounding neighborhood 
was razed to the ground.

Eleven people linked to the group were killed. Among them were five 
children, aged seven to 14.

Last year the city apologized formally 
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/13/philadelphia-1985-move-bombing-apology> 
for the “immeasurable and enduring harm” caused in the bombing, paving 
the way to this year’s inaugural commemoration.

Smoke billows over rowhouses in West Philadelphia after the 1985 bombing.
Smoke billows over rowhouses in West Philadelphia after the 1985 
bombing. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

The forensic anthropology course in which the bones of a Move child are 
being used has almost 5,000 enrolled students. It was filmed in February 
2019 and is taught by Janet Monge, an adjunct professor in anthropology 
at the University of Pennsylvania and a visiting professor in the same 
subject at Princeton.

The Move “case study” is broken up into five online videos, in which 
Monge relates the history of the 1985 catastrophe. In one video she 
picks up the bones and holds them up to the camera.

Monge describes the remains in vivid terms. They consist of two bones – 
a pelvis and femur – that belonged to a small girl probably in her teens 
that were discovered held together “because they were in a pair of jeans”.

The pelvis was cracked “where a beam of the house had actually fallen on 
this individual”. The fragment showed signs of burnt tendons around the 
hip joint.

“The bones are juicy, by which I mean you can tell they are the bones of 
a recently deceased individual,” Monge continues. “If you smell it, it 
doesn’t actually smell bad – it smells kind of greasy, like an 
older-style grease.”

The UPenn and Princeton academic does not inform her students that she 
is displaying the remains without permission of the girl’s family. She 
is, however, open about the tragic nature of the confrontation that led 
to the child’s death in Osage Avenue.

“It was one of the great tragedies, to witness the remains as they were 
found and moved from this location … I still feel unsettled by many 
aspects of it,” she says. She also shares with the class that Move 
continues to exist to this day: “The organization is still active in 
Philadelphia.”

The display of the human remains of a Black girl who would be in her 40s 
today had she survived the police bombing that took her life is certain 
to intensify the debate over the way the remains of Black people are 
handled by academia. The subject has been a talking point for decades, 
but has intensified in recent months following the mass protests over 
Floyd’s death.

The Move bones have never positively been identified. But given their 
small size and features, they almost certainly belong to one of the 
older Move girls who died in the inferno.

The oldest was a 14-year-old called Tree Africa (all members of Move 
take the last name Africa to denote their collective commitment to Black 
liberation). Michael Africa Jr, a Move member who was a friend of Tree’s 
and who was six at the time of the bombing, described her as a 
responsible kid who, as her name suggested, was passionate about 
climbing trees.

“When we went to a park, the first thing she would do is scout out the 
biggest tree. She was always the first one up, and she always went the 
highest,” he told the Guardian.

Tree’s mother is Consuela Dotson Africa. At the time of the fire she was 
serving a 16-year prison sentence related to an earlier police 
confrontation 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/31/a-siege-a-bomb-48-dogs-and-the-black-commune-that-would-not-surrender> 
with Move in 1978; she still lives in the Philadelphia area.

Michael Africa Jr in 2018.
Michael Africa Jr in 2018. Photograph: Ed Pilkington/The Guardian

The other possible identification of the bones would be Delisha Africa, 
who was 12 in 1985. When she died, both her parents – Delbert Africa and 
Janet Africa – were similarly in prison in relation to the 1978 
confrontation.

They were part of the so-called Move 9 who were each sentenced to 30 
years to life for the contested shooting of a police officer.

Both Delisha’s parents were released 
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/25/move-9-black-radicals-women-freed-philadelphia> 
from prison 
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/18/move-9-delbert-orr-africa-released-prison> 
after more than 40 years behind bars. Delbert died last June, five 
months after he was paroled.

Janet was set free in 2019, just three months after Monge recorded her 
forensic anthropology course using bones that potentially belonged to 
Janet’s daughter. Janet Africa continues to be an active Move member 
living in Philadelphia.

Neither Janet nor Consuela have commented on the revelation that their 
daughters’ remains are possibly being used to teach online anthropology 
courses. But it is understood that neither of them gave their consent 
for them to be used that way.

“Nobody said you can do that, holding up their bones for the camera. 
That’s not how we process our dead. This is beyond words. The 
anthropology professor is holding the bones of a 14-year-old girl whose 
mother is still alive and grieving,” Michael Africa Jr said.

Africa Jr said that the discovery of the online course just days before 
the inaugural day of remembrance of the 1985 bombing was “such a shame, 
such a tragedy. After 36 years we find out that not only were these 
children abused and mistreated and bombed and burned, they haven’t even 
been allowed to rest in peace.”

The precise sequence of events relating to the Move bones remains 
sketchy. For years they sat in a cardboard box at the Penn Museum, part 
of the University of Pennsylvania where Monge is the leading bones expert.

It transpires that a Penn anthropologist, Alan Mann, acquired the 
remains after he was asked in the immediate aftermath of the bombing to 
provide specialist advice to the Philadelphia medical examiner in an 
attempt to identify the fragments. Mann kept possession of the bones, 
and in 2001 took them with him when he transferred to Princeton.

The remains appear to have shuttled between the two Ivy League 
institutions until 2019, when Monge, who had worked closely with Mann 
over many years, filmed her online course using the pelvis and femur 
fragments.

Where the bones are now located remains a mystery. The University of 
Pennsylvania told the Guardian that a set of remains of two bones from 
one individual, who has never been identified, “have been returned to 
the custody of Dr Mann at Princeton University”.

But Princeton told the Guardian that it had only become aware of the 
issue this week and insisted it was not in possession of the bones. “We 
can confirm that no remains of the victims of the Move bombing are being 
housed at Princeton University,” a spokesman said.

Monge did not respond to Guardian inquiries.

The controversy over the Move bones comes just a week after Penn Museum 
apologized 
<https://www.penn.museum/documents/pressroom/MortonCollectionRepatriation-Press%20release.pdf> 
for the “unethical possession of human remains” in its Samuel Morton 
Cranial collection.

The collection was compiled in the first half of the 19th century and 
used by Morton to justify white supremacist theories; it contained the 
remains of Black Philadelphians as well as 53 crania 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/us/Penn-museum-slavery-skulls-Morton-cranial.html> 
of enslaved people from Cuba and the US, which will now be repatriated 
or reburied.

A view of Osage Avenue in Philadelphia after the bombing.
A view of Osage Avenue in Philadelphia after the bombing. Photograph: 
Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

Anthropologists and historians have become increasingly sensitive to the 
issues around the handling of remains. Michael Blakey, professor of 
anthropology at the College of William & Mary, was involved in the first 
reburial of African American bones from the Smithsonian Institution, 
which took place a year after the Move bombing, in 1986, and involved 
the remains of Black Philadelphians.

In the 1990s he directed the development of the African Burial Ground in 
New York, which was turned into a national monument following the full 
involvement of the local Black community. “We decided then we would not 
conduct any research without the permission of the community, and we 
created the precedent for informed consent involving any skeletal 
remains,” Blakey said.

The Guardian asked Blakey for his reaction to the news that 
anthropologists were still deploying African American bones in their 
teaching to this day in the absence of community permission. He replied: 
“The United States continues to operate on the basis of white privilege. 
What you are seeing here is the scientific manifestation of that – the 
objectification of the ‘other’, and the disempathy that is socialized in 
a society in which whites assume that they have control.”

The misuse of Black remains for scientific purposes has a long history 
in America. In 1989, construction workers in Augusta, Georgia, 
discovered almost 10,000 individual human bones under the former 
premises of the Medical College of Georgia.

The fragments came from corpses that were sold to the college by grave 
robbers and taken from Augusta’s cemetery for impoverished African 
Americans. The college used them in medical training and dissections.

Samuel Redman, a historian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst 
and author of Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in 
Museums, said the discovery of the Move bones was all the more 
disturbing given how recently the deaths occurred.

“There are people alive who are affected by this, not just in an 
emotional way but in a trauma-inducing way that could be harmful. The 
notion of ‘do no harm’ should be part and parcel of our research and 
teaching – we need to wrestle with this problem much more completely.”


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