2022-09-22: Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) recently apologized for the grave robbing of Black cemeteries,
In the 1800s, the Medical College of Virginia procured cadavers for dissection by illegally digging up bodies in Black cemeteries in Richmond. When the bodies were no longer of use, they were cast into a nearby well.
In 1994, construction workers laying the foundation for the Kontos Medical Sciences Building made a discovery. Twenty-five feet below ground, near the end of East Marshall Street, they found a well filled with human remains, leather shoes, glass bottles and mud.
What was recovered included more than 400 bones belonging to at least 44 adults and nine children. Two rib bones belonged to an infant, and two more to a newborn. Many of the skeletons were incomplete.
Throughout the 19th century, the school (VCU) hired workers known as resurrectionists to illegally dig up bodies, often from the Shockoe Hill African burial ground, a mile north at the intersection of North Fifth and Hospital streets (Richmond), wrote VCU archivist Jodi Koste in a report.
Researchers studied the skulls and determined most of them were of African ancestry. Alongside the bones, Mouer found detritus — 25 leather shoes, olive green glass bottles, the remains of three dogs and a cat. The articles dated to the mid-1800s.
DNA analysis
The VCU committees wrestled with the question of how to proceed. DNA extraction is an invasive process that requires further disturbing the remains.
There are four basic steps to DNA analysis, which will take two-plus years to complete: extracting the DNA from the bones, quantifying it, preparing it for analysis and sequencing it.
There are two types of sequencing. First: short tandem repeats, or STR, the type of sequencing the FBI conducts at a crime scene to match a suspect to a strand of hair. VCU researchers will use STR to match bones belonging to the same person.
Second: single nucleotide polymorphism, which the researchers call SNP or “snips.” They’ll use SNP to determine the person’s sex, hair color, eye color, height and blood type.
SNP will also tell the researchers the ancestry of each individual, which the Smithsonian already determined for some of the bones. Most of the people found in the well were of African descent. At least two were European, and six were undetermined.
Using chemical analysis on the teeth, the researchers will try to determine if the people lived in Africa before coming to the U.S. Elements such as calcium and strontium in food are incorporated into the teeth and bones. By analyzing the strontium, the researchers hope to tell where the people lived.
The pie-in-the-sky goal is to match the DNA to descendants alive today who have submitted their DNA to biotechnology companies such as Ancestry.com or 23andMe.
The VCU committees hope to rebury the individuals at the African American burial ground downtown or Evergreen Cemetery. A final destination has not been determined.
Reference:
Hundreds of human bones were found in a Richmond well. Now VCU hopes to learn their origins.
Eric Kolenich Apr 3, 2022
https://richmond.com/news/local/education/hundreds-of-human-bones-were-found-in-a-richmond-well-now-vcu-hopes-to-learn/article_af9ec45f-ac5b-5467-95e5-c51f5c128769.html
Organ Theft:
September 19, 2022 VCU apologizes for 1968 heart transplant
RICHMOND - Acknowledging its "grave injustice" against Black patients, Virginia Commonwealth University apologized Friday for the grave robbing and discarding of bodies in the 1800s and the 1968 transplant of a man's heart taken without consent.
In 1968, a team at the Medical College of Virginia led by Dr. Richard Lower performed the first human-to -human heart transplant in the American South.
A Black laborer, Bruce Tucker, arrived at the hospital with a severe head injury. The doctors deemed his condition too grave for him to survive.
The transplant team removed his heart and gave it to Joseph Klett, a white businessman. It was later determined that neither Bruce Tucker nor his family consented to the transplant.
The story became the focus of the 2020 book "The Organ Thieves" by former Richmond Times - Dispatch journalist Chip Jones.
Tucker's family didn't know the heart had been removed until they were told by a funeral director, Jones said.
Ref: Lynchburg, News & Advance, Monday September 19, 2022, page A5.
