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The remains, used in the 19th century as part of now discredited racial science, are being laid to rest on Saturday in a traditional jazz funeral.
May 30, 2025Updated 8:29 p.m. ET
Sometime before Jan. 10, 1872, a young Black laborer named William Roberts checked himself into Charity Hospital in New Orleans. Just 23 years old, he was from Georgia and had a strong build, according to hospital records. His only recorded sickness was diarrhea.
He was one of 19 Black patients who died at the hospital in December 1871 and January 1872, and whose skulls were sent to Germany to be studied by a doctor researching a now wholly discredited science that purported a correlation between the shape and size of a skull and a person’s intellect and character.
The skulls languished in Germany for about 150 years until Leipzig University contacted the city of New Orleans two years ago to repatriate them.
They were returned to New Orleans this month, and on Saturday morning those 19 people who died in the 1800s are being honored with a jazz funeral before their skulls are interred.
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While the return of human remains from museum collections has become more common, the repatriation of these 19 Black cranial remains to New Orleans is believed to be the first major international restitution of the remains of Black Americans from Europe, according to Paul Wolff Mitchell, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam who studies the 19th century history of race and science in the United States and Europe.
