CASCA Annual Meeting 2021: Keynote Lecture Black Bones Matter: Notes Toward a Radical Humanism in Anthropology Conférence annuelle de la CASCA 2021 : discours inaugural Les ossements noirs comptent : notes pour un humanisme radical en anthropologie

In 1985, teenage sisters Delisha and Tree Africa lived in West Philadelphia, in a communal housing settlement founded by a revolutionary organisation known as MOVE. Originally called the “Christian Movement for Life” and renamed MOVE in the early 1970s, the group combined philosophies of Black nationalism and a lifestyle of raw foods, urban farming and opposition to modern science and capitalism. Founded by Vincent Leaphart (1931–85), later known as John Africa, MOVE was one of a range of Black consciousness groups advocating for communal living and green politics. However, on May 13, 1985, this community formation came to an end. Neighbors had filed complaints about the number of animals on the property, the garbage piled up around the home, the use of a bullhorn to transmit community lectures based on John Africa’s teachings and the group’s refusal to pay its water and electric bills. Thus, the city issued a search warrant and the police were sent to the MOVE compound. When MOVE members remained unresponsive to the warrant, police escalated with military-grade weapons, even though they knew there were children present. The settlement was flushed with firehoses and blasted with tear gas, and holes were blown in the walls. This led to a shootout, with some members remaining trapped in the houses. Conflicting reports indicate that group members who did try to leave were fired on by police. Shortly thereafter, a helicopter dropped C4 explosives on the houses. This started a fire that spread rapidly. At the end of the onslaught, six adults and five children were dead, including sisters Delisha, Tree and Netta Africa. The state surveillance apparatus, combined with police militarisation that killed eleven members of the MOVE family, is part of the broader history of surveillance of Black empowerment organisations by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. But these apparatuses have gathered force from the past four hundred years of anti-Black racism. From histories of slavery and degradation to convict labour, lynching, segregation and mass incarceration, anti-Black violence is longstanding. It has been upheld not only by federal, state and municipal laws but also through social and political processes of surveillance, scrutiny and evidence-making that devalue Black and Brown lives, as scholars Simone Browne (2015), Christina Sharpe (2016) and others have shown. Following the bombing of 1985, the remains of most of the eleven deceased were returned to MOVE family members for burial. However, Tree and Delisha’s remains were held in the city morgue for more than six months. Commissioned by the City of Philadelphia, forensic pathologist Ali Hameli confirmed that the bodies pulled from the rubble belonged to six adults and five children. The analysis of bones and teeth led him to conclude that some were from Delisha Africa, a child of around twelve years of age, and others were from Katricia “Tree” Africa, whom he estimated to be fourteen. Yet, Ali Hameli was unable to identify some of the pelvic and femur bones because they were burned beyond recognition. City officials therefore turned to Professor Alan Mann, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, to assist with the analysis. But in the end, Mann was not able to ascertain to which girl the bones belonged. By December 1985, the Africa family members thought that they had buried Tree and her sibling Netta. They assumed that Delisha had been buried by the state in September 1986. But some of the girls’ bones were kept at the Penn Museum until 2001, when Alan Mann took a job at Princeton and brought the remains with him. Unbeknownst …