The Washington Post has published a follow-up to its investigation into the Smithsonian Institution, which has a staggering collection of human body parts, including brains — and few of the remains were obtained through ethical means. Now, in the follow-up report, the Post has reported that most of the victims were Washington, D.C.’s most vulnerable residents.
Ales Hrdlicka (1869-1943) was the anthropologist responsible for much of the collection of body parts, and he had a specific goal in mind: to prove that minorities, but especially Black people, were inferior to whites. Creating a “racial brain collection” was part of how he would “prove” this long-debunked theory. Of the 74 brains he got from residents of Washington, D.C., 48 were Black. Others were from disabled persons or were taken from children — including 19 obtained from preborn children.
At least one of these brains was taken after the preborn child was killed in an abortion.
One of the children, Moses, died as an infant, and Hrdlicka performed the autopsy on him, with the family’s consent; however, they had no idea that he was also taking the child’s brain. It has remained in the Smithsonian’s collection for decades, though Michelle Farris, a distant relative, is now fighting to get it back so it can buried properly.
“It feels like my family was robbed of something,” Farris said. “A child — especially of that age — can’t speak up for themselves.” Since the Washington Post’s initial investigation, just five of the brains have been returned to either the person’s family, or their cultural heirs — such as an indigenous tribe.
While the Smithsonian has expressed willingness to return the remains, those remains must be requested through a formal petition, and as in Moses’ case, most of the families don’t even know the collection exists, much less that a relative has body parts in it. Though the Smithsonian has names for at least 100 of the brains, the institution has not attempted to contact anyone or publish the names so their families can reclaim them.
READ: The media is outraged over stolen body parts… but only if it doesn’t involve abortion
An undercover investigation from the Center of Medical Progress found through documentation and video investigations that Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry still harvest body parts from the most vulnerable among us — preborn children — and sell them for medical research.
Notably, Hrdlicka was an ardent eugenicist — something he had in common with Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. Sanger accepted an invitation to speak at a Ku Klux Klan meeting and surrounded herself with racists and eugenicists. Lothrop Stoddard was the Exalted Cyclops of the Massachusetts chapter of the Ku Klux Klan… and also served on the board of Sanger’s American Birth Control League (ABCL) — the organization that would later become Planned Parenthood. He believed that “non-white races must be excluded from America.” Clarence Gamble, heir of the Procter and Gamble company fortune, served as a director of both Sanger’s ABCL and Planned Parenthood boards and was also a eugenicist, supporting laws mandating the sterilization of the disabled. In a letter discussing the notorious “Negro Project” with Sanger, he said:
The mass of Negroes, particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear children properly.
In his 1904 guide to eugenics, Hrdlicka echoes these beliefs. He wrote of wanting to obtain brains from white people, of which he had “abundant opportunity,” but also from “American negroes, which will be of increasing interest on account of the intellectual progress and mixture of this element in the American population.”
In addition to brains, there are still numerous other remains in the collection, including bones and even complete skeletons.
“To me, it’s very upsetting,” Native American anthropologist Brad Hatch told the Washington Post. “They essentially pulled our ancestors out of the ground, discarded who knows how many of them, and then the large pieces that they could identify, they took back and they’re holding them, essentially in storage where they can’t really be given the respect they deserve.”
