“Shock and awe.” That was Fatimah Jackson’s reaction when police dropped a makeshift bomb on a Philadelphia residential building on May 13, 1985. The brick rowhouse was the shared home of MOVE, an organization that advocates for black liberation, natural living and animal rights. After a day of confrontation and shootingDuring which MOVE members refused to leave the building, the city’s mayor gave the green light to police to drop an explosive device. In the inferno that followed, 61 houses burned to the ground – and six adults and five children were killed.
The consequences of that day are still being felt. In 2021, local journalists reported that the University of Pennsylvania had been keep human remains of the bombing – tentatively identified as Katricia “Tree” Africa, 14, and Delisha Africa, 12 – in a cardboard box on a shelf, without their loved ones’ knowledge or consent. The remains, initially entrusted sent to the school by the Philadelphia medical examiner’s office, had also been used as teaching materials.
Although Delisha and Tree’s remains have since been returned to their families — and the school and city have apologized — the MOVE incident is one example in a long line of researchers holding human remains without consent, says Jackson, a biological anthropologist who retired in 2024 from Howard University in Washington, DC. “We are the ones who have this material,” she said. “Scientists are the culprits here.”
Encouraged by the MOVE revelations, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists created a working group in 2021 to develop new guidelines for the ethical study of human remains, with Jackson as co-chair. It was an intimidatingly large project, she said, but too important not to take on. “Even after the Civil War, people in black communities would talk about grave robbers who would come and steal bodies, and those bodies would show up at white medical schools,” she says. “We had a lot of pain, but we had no solution to relieve it.”
Other experts see Jackson as a natural fit for the project. “In my own career, I have seen major changes in the way we talk about ancestors, in the way we view their treatment, and in the need to consult descendants or contemporary experts,” says Jennifer Raff, a genetic anthropologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Jackson, she said, “was and remains one of the most influential voices in this movement.”
Research on remains
Anthropologists and anatomists have studied human remains without consent for centuries. In the 1800s, physician Samuel George Morton collected hundreds of human skulls, launching a new field of science and reinforcing his view of white superiority. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History alone holds the remains of approximately 30,700 individuals. Many come from pauper graves, slave cemeteries, Native American burial sites or countries formerly colonized by the West, notably India.
“Particularly in the early days of American physical anthropology, there was an expectation that science and scientific research would be paramount and take precedence over all other considerations,” says Raff.
These practices began to come under criticism in the 1970s. Maria Pearson – a member of the Turtle Clan of the Yankton Sioux – challenged the way research institutions treated Native American remains and demanded that they be returned to their communities. His work led to the passage of the first state law protecting Native burial sites, in Iowa, in 1976 – and ultimately the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990.
NAGPRA led to the repatriation of thousands of Native American remains. But it has not been without controversy. After the discovery of the nearly complete 8,400-year-old skeleton of an individual known as the Elder, or Kennewick Man, on the banks of the Columbia River in 1996, five Columbia Basin tribes requested the remains under the new law; instead, researchers won a lawsuit to study them. Years of legal battles and forensic tests followed. In 2017, the remains were finally returned to the tribes and buried in a hidden location in the Pacific Northwest.
The fate of other remains, including those of enslaved individuals, was equally difficult. The nation’s oldest and largest cemetery for people of African descent was discovered in Manhattan during construction of a government building in 1991. Only after sustained protests did officials decide to preserve the site, eventually creating the African Burial Ground National Monument.
Scientists’ traditional treatment of human remains has been “kind of a fight,” Jackson says. But that has started to change. By 2024, at least three major scientific organizations had published guidelines for the care of these remains: the American Association for Anatomy, the American Anthropological Association, and the Smithsonian Institution.
Contemporary anthropologists are still grappling with the legacy of their ancestors. “We have these collections that were put together by early physical anthropologists,” says Raff. They contain a mixture of skeletons, artifacts and DNA. “We’re struggling to figure out what is the most ethical way to care for them, to study them. In many cases, it’s not about studying them. In many cases, it’s about returning them to their contemporary descendants.”
African-American anthropology
Jackson was born in 1950 and raised in Denver. His family had been among the first settlers of Dearfield, an African-American town abandoned after the Great Depression. In Denver’s Five Points neighborhood, Jackson lived among African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Japanese Americans who had recently returned from World War II internment camps. In his community, “a lot of people have been victims of the other side of the coin,” Jackson says.
In the late 1960s, Jackson enrolled at the University of Colorado at Boulder — and found herself regularly in the company of white people for the first time. It was a kind of inspiration. “I was interested in biological anthropology because of the morphological differences I saw in the people around me,” she says.
After two years, on the recommendation of a trusted professor, Jackson transferred to Cornell University to continue her studies in anthropology. She studied genetics, nutrition and parasitology. She also met her future husband, nutritionist Robert Jackson. Coincidentally, she had first seen his photo in a Colorado newspaper: he was one of several African-American students who took over Cornell’s Willard Straight Hall during a 1969 protest demanding a black studies curriculum.
The couple married and Jackson graduated in 1972. They moved to Tanzania that same year, where Robert did postgraduate field work and Jackson took a three-year leave of absence from his studies. She had the first two of their six children and worked as a teacher to support the family.
Then Jackson’s life changed irrevocably. She contracted malaria in 1974 and the infection was brutal: she temporarily lost her sight and could neither walk nor speak.
Near death, Jackson promised God that if she survived, she would study malaria. Her prayers were answered and she recovered. In 1975, she began a doctorate. at Cornell. But by the time she was ready to return to the field, Tanzania and Uganda were at war. Reluctant to return to what was now a war zone, she moved to Liberia, where she wrote a thesis on genetic adaptations to malaria in Liberian mothers and children.
When she finally returned to the United States in 1980, Jackson noticed the racism – both overt and subtle – that was a part of everyday life. “People refused to get in the elevator with us,” she said. And his chosen field, anthropology, had often sidelined the experiences of disenfranchised groups. “Racial science was still very present in anthropology at that time,” she says, and many authors are still publishing pseudoscientific studies on racial differences in characteristics such as intelligence.
For Jackson, this bias reached its climax during the revolution Human Genome Project. The project, which ran from 1990 to 2003, used the DNA of 20 people: one of mixed ancestry and 19 of primarily European ancestry. Although Jackson supported the project, she also saw it as a continuation of 20th-century practices in which African Americans were systematically excluded from research collecting basic scientific and medical data.
The project leaders “wanted to characterize the human genome, but which genome? Jackson asks. In 1994, she helped her academic colleagues write a manifesto in which they called for the project to include more samples from African Americans – and more African American researchers.
This experience inspired Jackson to develop a more inclusive approach to genomics. In 2009, while at the University of Maryland, College Park, she published a paper on a new technique she called ethnogenetic stratification, which helps identify patterns of genetic variation within complex populations.
“African Americans are an amalgamation of many different African groups, with a mixture of some Native American groups and specific European groups,” Jackson explains. His new method aimed to determine where different genetic variants came from, how they interacted with environmental and cultural factors, and how they affected disease risk. Instead of treating African Americans as a single group, this helped reveal the richness of their genetic diversity, Jackson reported in the Annals of Human Biology.
“I think she has contributed a lot, in general, to more critical thinking about groups of p people, without focusing on racial categorization,” says evolutionary biologist Benjamin Auerbach of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
In 2018, Jackson and his team at Howard University published a study detailing how institutionalized racism and slavery may have affected the biology of African Americans via epigenetics. Previous studies had shown that the process – in which environmental signals can change gene expression without altering the underlying DNA – could be triggered by high levels of the stress hormone cortisol. This work in the Journal of Clinical Epigenetics potential epigenetic changes suggested in African American populations – and proposed that scientists start looking for them. Subsequent studies found faster epigenetic aging in African Americans repeatedly exposed to racism.
Then, in 2021, the MOVE bombing returned to the spotlight.
Caring for ancestors
The revelation that the remains of MOVE victims had been preserved without the consent of their loved ones, carelessly placed in a box and used as teaching props sparked widespread outrage.
The Association of Biological Anthropologists has chosen Auerbach to lead its new working group aimed at systematizing the ethical management of human remains; he immediately asked Jackson to be his co-president. As director of the Cobb Biological Anthropology Lab at Howard University and with her decades of community involvement, Jackson was the ideal partner, Auerbach says. “She’s really good at thinking about nuance.”
Not that it’s easy. In the wake of the MOVE revelations – and the racial reckoning inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement – some researchers have publicly advocated for an end to all studies involving human remains. Jackson and his colleagues wanted to take a more thoughtful approach. “The goal was to broaden the debate and not trivialize what had been done,” Jackson explains. Instead, the working group sought to balance the value of scientific research with respect for the communities it affects. “The community has the right to participate in research,” she says.
First, the task force narrowed the scope of the project to focus on a single group. He chose African Americans, who Jackson said are overrepresented in old human tissue collections. Then, he solicited the opinions of members of this community.
“Since we didn’t have money for the task force, I had to rely on my students,” Jackson says. She taught 52 of them how to lead focus groups and ask descendant communities how they wanted their ancestors’ remains treated. Over four years, his students spoke to more than 3,000 African Americans from 35 states.
“You have to ask me before you work on my grandmother’s bones,” said one respondent, a young man from Orange Mount, Tennessee. Another, an older man from Chicago, said: “Once we give our approval [for the research]it’s not over. We need to be kept informed of everything else.
Auerbach also interviewed anthropologists across the United States to find out what skeletal materials they had — and what they hoped to do with them.
The result is a set of recommendations published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology in March. In addition to requiring “explicit consent” from affected communities, the guidelines call on institutions to inventory the remains of their heritage collections, verify the identity of descendant communities, and engage in dialogue with these groups. Researchers and community members said they wanted mutual formal partnerships to help them make decisions about ancestral remains.
Raff warns that the next steps could be difficult. Different communities will want different outcomes, she said. And the mistrust born of abuses such as the Tuskegee experiments — in which African Americans with syphilis were not informed of their disease state and went untreated — still resonates today.
“We’re lucky,” says Raff, “to have very thoughtful researchers like Dr. Jackson, who go out there and do the work of talking to communities and finding out what they think we should be doing.”
But the current environment for scientific research in the United States makes this work more difficult, Jackson says. “The guidelines were created in a more progressive political situation.” She worries that the Trump administration’s reduction in funding for social science and social justice research will cripple the work of her group and others.
“At least we provided the basics,” Jackson says of the project. She hopes others will build on what she has done. “You’re starting to hear the voice of the people. It’s taken a long time, but it’s the change we’ve been waiting for.”