Clipping from the Inquirer (1894)
by Anonymous, 2025
The University of Pennsylvania’s history is a story of scientific racism and dehumanizing practices. In 2021, facing pressure from racial justice community organizers, the Penn Museum and the University issued long overdue apologies for displaying the skulls of enslaved Africans in a eugenist collection and for stealing the remains of nine children killed in the 1985 police bombing of the pro-Black MOVE organization.
Penn’s chronicle of devaluing Black life goes beyond the Penn Museum — the infamous Penn dermatologist Albert Klingman and James Fulton developed the industry standard acne fighting product Retin-A through testing on Black men imprisoned at Holmesburg Prison in North Philly. Klingman excitedly described their test incarcerated subjects as “Acres of Skin”.
There is a chapter of Penn’s history of medical racism and grave robbing still unwritten, this article being the first on the subject. In 1894, Penn medical students dissected a lynched corpse. Outside of newspapers from that year, there are no records of who they dissected and what their story is.
This story is consequential to understanding how Penn emerged as a research giant and why Penn is no exception from the totalizing racism of the Jim Crow era. It reveals how racial justice is not achieved by University task forces. Rather, it is achieved by ripping up the fibers of the University itself, repatriating its stolen wealth and resources to the working class Black communities Penn extracts from. Chiefy, racial justice looks like self-determination for our communities of color over so-called “research” and “knowledge production” that for so long they have been delegated the subject of, rather than the author.
Following the US Civil War until 1970, 6 million Black people moved North in the Great Migration. By 1930, over 150,000 migrants found work and established communities in Pennsylvania. The North was popularly portrayed as a promised land, a refuge from the deep seated racism of the Jim Crow South, a place ripe with opportunity and freedom. However, Northern industrial life proved inhospitable; Black migrants faced racist hiring practices, housing discrimination, and white supremacist violence.
There are two documented racial terror lynchings of Black men in Pennsylvania from 1870-1950 — men named Richard Puryear (?-1894) and Zacharia Walker (~1883-1911). Both men were born in Virginia and moved to Pennsylvania for industrial work — Puryear worked on the rails and Walker in steelyards. White mobs murdered both men. Pennsylvania passed one of the nation’s first anti-lynching laws in 1923. This would be impossible without relentless community organizing, media campaigning, and advocacy by the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) following Zacharia Walker’s 1911 lynching. A historic marker was erected in 2011 in Coatesville, PA, with Walker’s grand nieces in attendance at the ceremony.
Richard Puryear’s life nor violent death have received recognition. White supremacist townspeople, the courts, and the medical system violently erased him. However, at his the time of his murder in 1894, his story made national headlines as testimony to the righteousness of lynch mobs and the criminality of Black men.
In 1894, sheriffs jailed Puryear on accusation of theft and murder of a white man in Stroudsburg, the seat of Monroe County, PA. Puryear eventually escaped jail and took refuge at his friend from Virginia’s home. However, white townsmen were enraged at the alleged criminal’s escape and sought retribution. A lynch mob of 50-2001 chased down and hung Puryear.
Not a single man was investigated or convicted for murdering Pureyear. The racist court system defended lynching as a form of extrajudicial justice. Further, the racist press justified lynching by portraying victims as villians who got what they had coming for them.
The story disseminated about the mob who lynched Puryear is a sensationalist crime report that erases the context that deemed Puryear criminal, undeserving of basic justice, and deserving of a violent death at the hands of a violent mob. The Inquirer called the events “an exciting chase” and describes the details of how the white supremacists tied their fatal noose around Puryear’s neck.2 Other headlines read: “He broke jail at Strousburg and is captured by a posse, who put the negro fiend to death”.3 They quote townsfolk calling to “lynch the n****r” and how hundreds traveled to gawk at Puryear’s mutilated corpse.4
Witness testimony bore no success getting evidence, nobody admitted to knowing someone who was present during the lynching, and nobody was charged for lynching Puryear. Any admission of guilt could incriminate townsmen, so the town defended dozens of their men who committed an act of racial terrorism.
One paper defended the lynch mob from a small town fiscal responsibility orientation, writing that the extrajudicial murder of Puryear saved taxpayers “five to ten thousand dollars.”5 Few papers supported Puryear’s basic rights: an African American paper from Puryear’s hometown, the Richmond Planet, covered the lynching with humanity for Puryear and demands for justice.
Puryear did not get to rest in peace. A racketeer sold parts of the rope from which the mob hung Puryear as a souvenir, a popular white supremacist practice at the time. The rope went for a quarter, the knot of the noose went for a premium of $1.50.6
Puryear’s body was ultimately shipped to the one and only University of Pennsylvania “for dissection”. 7The dissection of Black, Brown, and working poor people’s corpses was a common practice in the 19th century. Anatomy professors voraciously lobbied for access to “unclaimed bodies” from hospitals and public institutions. These abducted bodies, who the medical community calls cadavers, regularly supplied the test subject for required dissection courses in medical and dental schools.
We have no records of Puryear at Penn, his body one of thousands made disposable by the deep racism and sterile lifelessness of medical education.
In 1882, just as in 2021, Philly’s Black communities protested Philadelphia universities’s racist grave robbing. Local medical schools plundered one of Philly’s most prominent Black cemeteries, Lebanon Cemetery. When muckraking journalists revealed the story, Philly’s Black community mobilized an “indignation meeting.” However, Philly’s “medical elite” and major state politicians, “Collaborated in passing a new anatomy law that required public officials throughout the state to turn over all unclaimed bodies for use by medical schools.”
The writers presented this law as a positive reform, legalizing the donation of unclaimed deceased people as cadavers for medical dissection to eliminate the illegal grave digging trade. However, the law crystallized power for the medical elite, placing them on the government board responsible for authorizing and regulating the procurement of cadavers.
There was an exception in the 1883 PA law for unclaimed bodies of military or state militia personnel, whom the state would assume the cost of burial. In all other cases, the state afforded loved ones a mere 36 hours to claim their dead.
Burial costs are hefty to the working poor for whom savings are hard to come by. Black communities understood this deep need, and it is no coincidence that some of the first mutual aid societies that cropped up in early American history were organizations that raised funds for funerals. Working poor migrants, like Puryear, were already living precariously. Living under material scarcity and distant from their hometowns, many state and medical colleges assumed control of the bodies of these so called “indigents” or “paupers.”
Once in Penn’s hands, the deceased became cadavers for dissection class, a requirement for all first and second year medical students in the time period. Penn medical school catalogues from the 1890s boast their great facilities, with modern dissection rooms describing the particularities of their sanitation practices.
In these descriptions, they reassure students, “Dissection is legal in Pennsylvania.” One course offering, “Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology” prepared students for providing evidence in courtroom and legal proceedings for issues from homicide, hanging, and “criminal abortion.”8 Doctors were complicit in maintaining law and order that policed Black people, justified their murders, and supported depriving people of reproductive autonomy. Scientific racism moves in lockstep with the anti-Black criminal justice system.
At the root of modern medical practices is a deep disregard for human subjects and human remains. Penn has been firmly on the side of advancing a medial and broader scholarly epistemology that advances the extraction knowledge by any means necessary, for profit and prestige.
Penn has no regard for Black ancestors or our Black neighbors today. Instead of skirting responsibility for medical abuse, grave robbing, and abducting the remains of Black victims of racial terrorism, Penn must engage in unprecedented reparations and restitution to save itself from the corruption of its deep absence of morality, principle, and humanity.
- Lancaster Intelligencer (Lancaster, Pennsylvania) · Sat, Mar 17, 1894 · Page 7 ↩︎
- The Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) · Fri, Mar 16, 1894 · Page 1 ↩︎
- Lancaster Intelligencer (Lancaster, Pennsylvania) · Sat, Mar 17, 1894 · Page 7 ↩︎
- The Semi-Weekly New Era (Lancaster, Pennsylvania) · Sat, Mar 17, 1894· Page 1 ↩︎
- The Pocono Record (Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania) · Wed, Feb 1, 1967 ·Page 9 ↩︎
- The Pocono Record (Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania) · Wed, Feb 1, 1967 · Page 9 ↩︎
- The Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) · Sat, Mar 17, 1894 · Page 3 ↩︎
- University of Pennsylvania Archives. Collection number: UPL 10.91
Full title: Catalogue of the University of Pennsylvania Department of Medicine (1885-1900). ↩︎
Penn Disorientation Guide 