Enslaved people’s bodies were dissected and kept for scientific study after death.

Evidence

Powerful people use their influence to control the narrative, but it’s the grassroots efforts that tell the story. So I continued to look for ways to make my story relevant. I scoured the papers daily, looking for stories with similar themes and threads, and then read about Mr. Fortune, a man who had been enslaved by a prominent Connecticut doctor who dissected his human remains following his death and preserved his skeleton for scientific study. Mr. Fortune was finally being given the dignity of a proper burial thanks to the children of the Waterbury school system, who petitioned the Mattatuck Museum, where the remains were gifted. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 334

Categorization

• SHARE: The Fortune case — an enslaved man dissected post-mortem, skeleton preserved in a museum, finally buried after schoolchildren petitioned — parallels Lanier’s own fight over Renty’s image; worth sending to someone tracking the Agassiz/medical-racism archive trail.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the precise legal path by which schoolchildren’s petition compelled the Mattatuck Museum to surrender Fortune’s remains — a rare case of a stolen body being returned by civic action rather than litigation.