Nat Turners remains were a mystery, rumours and ideas where they had ended up circulated. However, in light of Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation, the family have finally been returned a skull allegedly belonging to their historic ancestor.

In 1831, after Nat’s historic revolt, the subject of Birth Of A Nation, Nat fled. He was eventually caught and hung for his “crimes”. He was one of around 200 African-American enslaved victims that suffered death for the 55 white people murdered in the revolt.

Nat was on November 11th 1831. He was hanged from a tree in Jerusalem, Virginia. The town is now called Courtland.

Nat was said to have been hung, flayed and quarted. His body burried in the pauper cemetary and his brain and skull sent off for studying. Yet, these were rumours, no one knew for sure.

Since the popularity of Nat’s revolt have grown around the movie, a documentary “Rise Up: The Legacy of Nat Turner” led the family to trying to recover the skull and find out where it ended up.

The National Geographic reported:

Aguirre, the Turner descendant from Washington, expressed strong interest in contacting Hatcher to see if he’d be amenable to returning the skull to Virginia for a proper burial. The filmmakers arranged the call.

“I really can’t believe I’m talking to you,” Hatcher told Aguirre when they spoke. “I’ve been waiting years for this phone call.”

Family Stories and a Letter
How did the skull of a man born into slavery in Virginia wind up in Gary, Indiana? The chain of transmission includes Franklin and Cora Breckinridge, civil rights activists who donated the skull to Hatcher in 2002. They received it from Bob Franklin of Elkhart, Indiana, who says the skull was passed down in his family for three generations.

“I spent my whole life with this skull,” Franklin says. “My father typed a letter that he kept in the box with the relic just in case anything unexpected happened to our family. He thought it was important that people would know who the skull belonged to.”

The letter states that the skull was given to Franklin’s grandfather, Dr. Albert Gallatin Franklin, a physician in Richmond, Virginia, around 1900 by a female patient who inherited it from her father—one of the doctors who handled Turner’s body after he was executed.

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