SCIENCE : The Telltale Bones of Black History : Seven hundred skeletons teach a Howard University professor about hard times.
He’s not a mad scientist. But as Dr. Michael Blakey opens scores of skeleton-filled drawers in his Howard University offices, you can be forgiven if thoughts of grade B horror films fill the air.
Blakey acknowledges the evocation, and he smiles. He is not insulted by the connection because he knows his work is not only totally serious but historically and culturally important.
An assistant professor of anthropology at this traditionally black college, Blakey oversees a research collection of more than 700 skeletons, left over from Howard Medical School dissections performed between 1932 and 1969.
The collection is the third largest of its kind in America, but it is particularly important because three-quarters of the skeletons are from blacks, most of them indigent, born as long ago as 1850. The detailed demographic information that will eventually be gleaned from the collection could prove to be groundbreaking work in biological anthropology, the study of the human biology of a population, rather than an individual.
“What’s important for population studies is the cultural, ethnic, class and other characteristics of these people,” Blakey said. “What we seek to understand is how social conditions affect their biology.”
As an example, Blakey refers to a study he made of the leg bones of nearly 200 of the skeletons. He knew that between 1850 and 1950 there had been, thanks to better health care and diet, an increase of as much as 3/4 inch in stature every 10 years among the general American population. But he said his skeletons showed very little increase in stature because of the conditions of poverty.
“These skeletons provide a record of the health of this segment of the U.S. population,” he said. “We can study things like stature, and show the changes that have and have not taken place to improve the quality of physical life for the poor.”
Research like this is what persuaded the National Science Foundation to award a $147,000 grant to Howard University to preserve and study the collection. If it hadn’t been for Blakey, however, the estimated 150,000 bones might still be crumbling to pieces in a basement.
The collection was put together by W. Montague Cobb, an anatomy professor, from cadavers dissected by his students. Cobb was interested in studying the skeletons because, Blakey said, “in those days (the 1930s to the 1950s) the major interest in studying African-Americans was in how race influenced thinking, behavior and health--what was called biological determinism. A collection like this was only used to understand racial differences. It didn’t matter what their social situation was.”
It mattered to Cobb, but when he retired in 1973 (he died in 1990), the collection was largely forgotten. Blakey stumbled upon the skeletons nearly 10 years later.
Blakey’s work is not, however, confined to the Howard collection. He has acted as a consultant for American Indian groups attempting to rebury skeletons displayed in museums. He is also a major player in the academic warfare that will determine what groups study the Colonial slave graveyard recently unearthed in lower Manhattan.
“I think all science is political; it all has some level of subjectivity,” he said. “A lot of this has to do with who controls the past and the definition of a group. Is it the group itself or some other group? This is part of a worldwide struggle--various groups trying to wrestle back control over the representation of their past from those who have used science and history as an ideology of oppression.”
Don’t misunderstand. Blakey is not saying that only blacks or American Indians can study their respective cultures. He is saying, however, that for black scholars, “our particular relationships to (black) remains means we’re critical in a different way. We know more, and we tend to be willing to acknowledge more.”
Blakey refers to a recent experience he had while studying one of the Manhattan skeletons. There was a lesion around one ankle, which his white colleagues blamed on some unknown “infection.” But Blakey, noting the lesion’s location, said “it’s from a shackle. The man was a slave, and the infection came from being shackled.”
It is connections like these that Blakey hopes to make with the Howard skeletons. But he realizes that studying the poor provides an incomplete picture.
“I want to study a wealthy population, one from which we can really show the history of class disparity. We simply do not have a good handle on the historical biology of class.”
