Scholar Documents Purported Tale of a 19th Century Body Snatcher: Amid the stacks of books, exams to grade, lecture notes and meeting agendas in the office of Dr. Shawn Utsey, chairman of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of African American Studies, is a box of bones that are more than 100 years old. The bones, he believes, are part of a dark history few know.
After completing his award-winning documentary “Meet Me In The Bottom,” chronicling the effort to identify and memorialize a slave burial ground in Richmond, Va., Utsey began investigating claims that the slave burial site had been looted for corpses for medical training purposes.
