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3mo ago

New Orleans Jazz Funeral Honors 19 Black Individuals Repatriated From Germany

Their remains, taken from Charity Hospital for debunked racial pseudoscience in the 1870s, arrived in New Orleans on May 30 after a two-year repatriation effort by Dillard University.

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The skulls of 19 Black people who were returned to New Orleans after more than 150 years in Germany are loaded into a hearse for a memorial service. The remains were wrongfully taken out of the country in the late 1800s for racially-based scientific research.

Overview

  • The University of Leipzig delivered the long-held remains of 19 individuals to Dillard University on May 30, concluding a repatriation process that began in 2023.
  • On May 31, Dillard University hosted a memorial service and traditional jazz funeral to celebrate the lives of the deceased as people with names, stories and families.
  • Dillard’s Cultural Repatriation Committee identified 17 of the individuals—aged 15 to 70 and representing origins in eight states—through Charity Hospital archives, while two remain unnamed.
  • The remains were originally exhumed from Charity Hospital between December 1871 and January 1872 and shipped to Leipzig under a racist pseudoscience program aimed at proving white superiority.
  • Following the jazz funeral, the remains will be interred at the Hurricane Katrina Memorial in New Orleans as a permanent tribute and acknowledgment of past injustices.