BLACK LIFE ASTRIDE THE GRAVE
The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar) by Nia Akilah Robinson very engagingly uses grave robbing as a timeless trope for the persistent bodily appropriation that has marked African Americans’ lot for most of our nation’s history. Black people did not own their own bodies during chattel enslavement, and this dispossession has cut a wide swath through our culture, history, society, and medical status. From being forced into research to being robbed of the ability to accept or reject treatment to being displayed rather than treated in medical venues and hospitals, this history culminated in Black bodies being selectively targeted and stolen from often-segregated cemeteries for use in medical research. Thus, our bodies served as medical training material for anatomical dissection as part of education and treatment—from which Black people were systematically barred.
Only recently has the medical canon acknowledged the pervasiveness and racialized nature of graverobbing in the mainstream historical record. The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar) goes far beyond entertainment to enrich our understanding of this critical history in a manner that historical tomes and ethical arguments have failed to do. Race-targeted graverobbing was long dismissed as paranoid “old wives’ tales” or “urban legends.” However, thanks to groundbreaking historians, no one can now deny the events decried in The Great Privation. Modern research confirms what we have long believed to be true, including my own work Medical Apartheid and Michael Sappol’s revelatory book A Traffic
of Dead Bodies. For example, Robert L. Blakely and Judith M. Harrington’s Bones in the Basement details the discovery of a cache of 9,800 mostly African American bones secreted under the Medical College of Georgia’s old anatomy laboratory between 1835 and 1912. The multidisciplinary and multiracial scientific team found that 75 percent of the bones came from Black bodies of the Cedar Grove Cemetery, although Black people constituted only 42 percent of Augusta’s population.
The Medical College of Georgia was no anomaly. Throughout the United States, Black bodies were targeted by design. In fact, schools in many cities, including Charlotte, Philadelphia, and New York, placed newspaper advertisements to assure the white populace that only Black bodies would be appropriated in this manner. In 1831, the South Carolina Medical College advertised, “No place in the United States offers as great opportunities for the acquisition of anatomical knowledge. Subjects being obtained from among the colored population [emphasis mine] in sufficient numbers for every purpose, and proper dissection carried on without offending any individuals in our community!”
Southern medical schools also conducted a brisk business in selling purloined Black bodies to Northern schools. When his source of Black bodies became unreliable, Dr. John Warren of Harvard Medical School successfully made the case for moving the school from the university’s home base in Cambridge across the Charles River to Boston, where it could avail itself of cadavers from the poor Black and white denizens of the almshouse.
In New York City, when emboldened medical students dared to turn their grave-robbing attentions from the Negroes Burying Grounds to the white
cemeteries of Trinity Church, five thousand rioters stormed New York Hospital in the two-day Doctors’ Riot of 1788, pillaging Columbia Medical School and assaulting physicians in retaliation for disturbing the eternal rest of white New Yorkers. Black communities protested graverobbing, too, but to little avail due to chattel slavery and the lack of legal protections. As the editors of Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first Black newspaper, wrote in 1827, the year slavery was abolished in New York, “We wish to plead our own cause… too long have others spoken for us.” In The Great Privation, Nia Akilah Robinson allows these voices, spread over time and crises, to speak for themselves.
These newspaper accounts and other historical documents paint a damning portrait of medical violence and show the need for a historical and ethical reckoning. Robinson’s play makes this reckoning possible by adding nuanced layers to our understanding, which these isolated documents fail to provide.
This brings us to one of the most important revelations of The Great Privation: the critical importance of discerning for ourselves what such medical violence means and how best to not only survive, but to thrive, in its wake. The importance of this achievement cannot be exaggerated. From scholars who have chosen to downplay or to even deny the centuries of abuse to more recent, sometimes well-meaning but ill-informed scholars in the “white savior” mode who have sought to decry it, much import and complexity has been lost. It is critically important for us to speak for ourselves in this arena of medical history where anyone without a terminal degree has been denigrated and excluded from such conversations, even when those conversations center on our own communities and welfare.
The Great Privation restores nuance and ethical power to the historical perspective, even as it warmly entertains and informs, interjecting unexpected humor. Robinson’s constant evocation of time, from the summoning of ancestors to the relentless ticking of an onstage clock, to say nothing of the persistent dialogue between the historical and contemporary, reminds us that this persistent medical violence remains alive in the memories and in the rich oral histories of African Americans. While history may have belatedly acknowledged it, we have always understood its larger, dire meanings, and The Great Privation expands upon this tradition brilliantly in our postmodern era.
Harriet A. Washington, MA is a medical ethicist and prolific writer known for her seminal work Medical Apartheid. She currently teaches Bioethics at Columbia University.