The American Museum of Natural History plans to remove all human bones now on public display from its collection of about 12,000 human remains. Many skeletons include indigenous and enslaved Black people formerly used to promote white supremacist race theories.

Sean M. Decatur, who became the museum’s first Black president in April, recently announced the policy change in an email to staff, reports the Museums Association, an organization that advocated for socially engaged museums.

The museum currently features human remains in 12 display cases. In addition to removing the remains, the museum will allocate more resources to determine their origins and identities and improve the storage facilities where it keeps them.

“Human remains collections were made possible by extreme imbalances of power. Moreover, many researchers in the 19th and 20th centuries then used such collections to advance deeply flawed scientific agendas rooted in white supremacy — namely the identification of physical differences that could reinforce models of racial hierarchy,” Decatur wrote in a staff letter, according to The New York Times.

This vast collection includes human remains removed from a slave cemetery that likely dated back to colonial New York, the letter stated.

The museum identified three problematic categories in the collection that also raised ethical concerns. They included the skeletons of 2,200 Native Americans that a federal law, more than 30 years ago, required the museum to repatriate to descendants.

In a second category, the museum has about 400 remains in its “medical collection” that it may have obtained illegally. In the 1940s, medical schools initially held the unclaimed bodies that they transferred to the museum despite a law that appeared to ban such transfers.

The museum also holds the remains of five Black adults removed in 1903 from a Manhattan cemetery for enslaved people.

“Certainly as an African American, the question of race is one of particular interest,” Decatur told The Times. “The legacy of dehumanizing Black bodies through enslavement continues after death in how those bodies were treated and dehumanized in service of a scientific project.”

He added that the museum is committed to “identifying a restorative, respectful action in consultation with local communities” for those remains.

Decatur, who earned a doctorate in biophysical chemistry from Stanford University, was president of Kenyon College in Ohio before becoming president of the museum, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.