Thread by @intersectionist

1: There this a thing that happens where they drown the truth in details.

And that's what they did here: the highly paid partners at a fancy law firm, @llc_tucker, wrote a total POS 217 pg "independent legal report" for @Penn, claiming the Penn Museum never had Delisha's bones.

2: This claim was in response to two things:

1. The original reporting last April said @pennmuseum had the remains of 2 children murdered in the 1985 MOVE bombing.

2. Only one child's remains, Katricia/Tree's, were retrieved from the home a former curator & returned her family.

3: In their attempt to explain the discrepancy, incl eyewitness accounts & actual x-rays taken @CAAMatPenn of Delisha's remains, @Penn's report scapegoated a single graduate student, claiming he planted evidence...on a day when he was literally out of the country.
(Impressive!)

4: But the evidence that @MxAbdulAliy describes in their detailed new piece, incl material from 1986 from the Philadelphia City Archives, & 2018 from a @UPennAnth senior thesis, proves that both Tree's & Delisha's remains were at the museum, not buried as their families believed.

5: This leaves us with the disturbing & urgent question:

Where are Delisha's remains now?

Did the curator drive them to Princeton last April, along with Katricia's? Are they still @pennmuseum?

I do not know what can compel them to #ReturnDelisha, but I hope you'll help us try.

6:

LINKS!

That's the end of the thread for reading purposes, from here onwards I'll share links for all for of the above, in the order they are mentioned.

Tucker Law Group's report, commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania: penn.museum/documents/pres…

7: The original reporting on the Penn Museum's possession of the remains of victims of the MOVE bombings started with these two pieces, both published on April 21, 2021:

1. By @MxAbdulAliy in @PhillyInquirer:

inquirer.com/opinion/commen…

8:

2. By @Mkassutto in @billy_penn:

billypenn.com/2021/04/21/mov…

9: And among the many articles that followed was another piece in @PhillyInquirer by @MxAbdulAliy, with a report on archival research by @paulmitchell90 that spoke specifically to the question of whose remains were at the museum:
inquirer.com/opinion/commen…

10: Tucker Law Group claims they inspected the remains retrieved by the funeral home & confirmed that they included only the bones associated with Katricia/Tree.
The same report alleges a grad student made it look like Delisha's remains were at the museum. penn.museum/documents/pres…

11: @MxAbdulAliy's latest article, published on Wednesday by @hyperallergic, is based on hundreds of pages of archival documentation and shares the accurate timeline for the first time, along with clear evidence that the Penn lied in their report: hyperallergic.com/725976/philade…

12: Here are three critical documents from 1986, from the Philadelphia City Archives, which trace how, more than a year after the bombing, both Tree's AND Delisha's remains were given to the Penn Museum, instead of released for burial as the Medical Examiner's Office had claimed:

13: Some of the evidence from 2018 is actually in Penn's report, including entries from the Penn Museum's x-ray log (again: penn.museum/documents/pres…).

I will not share the evidence that is in Jane Weiss's 2019 senior thesis; nobody should see x-rays of murdered children's bones.

14: Finally, I'll offer this link, which provides a good overview of last year's events, plus the organizing against the Morton Cranial Collection that preceded them (tho the 1985/1986 timeline is a bit off, as already mentioned): hyperallergic.com/688818/how-the…

15: & truly finally: Why do I know so much about this?

I wrote about Samuel George Morton, whose collection of crania is now @pennmuseum, in my dissertation @brownarchaeolog.

More recently, I've written a (forthcoming) journal article about issues of data & repatriation re:...

16: ...both the MOVE remains and the Morton Cranial Collection; & am currently writing a chapter for my book "Liberation Archaeology" re: how the theft of Tree & Delisha's remains by the Penn Museum, as well as the 1985 MOVE bombing itself, are built upon Morton's racial science.

17: I am a member of one of the many descendent groups whose ancestors Morton stole from around the world in the 1830s & 1840s, and extracted data from to prove his theories re: brain size & racial hierarchy.

I learned of the ongoing work to #ReturnDelisha through my research.

18: My scholarship has never stopped at edges of my keyboard.

I've been honored to begin to educate myself more broadly about the history of the MOVE bombing and its aftermath; & to support in whatever ways I can the research, writing, & other organizing work already underway.

19: (I'm not at all just "educating myself"—folks in Philly have invested so much emotional energy, time, labor, care to help me learn. I guess I used that phrase cuz I'm now trying more to build on what they've taught me myself. & I couldn't've gotten here w/o their generosity.)