Today, the rise of cremation and body donation has altered funeral practices for many, but in poor communities — not least among a generation of African-Americans who migrated north from the Jim Crow South — a pauper’s grave and the specter of dismemberment never lost their horror as a final humiliation.
An opt-out provision in the law would seem to exempt the bodies of people who indicate that they do not want to be dissected or embalmed. But few are aware of it, and it may be unenforceable. Certainly it was unknown in the 1990s in the single-room occupancy hotel where an African-American woman named Gwendolyn Burke, blind and halt after a lifetime of menial work, had no way to avoid the potter’s field.
Sure enough, when she died at 89, Ms. Burke went to Hart Island. But first, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine claimed her as a cadaver and used her body for dissection for 13 months before she was interred in 2000.
“She didn’t deserve that,” said David Minton, the city social worker assigned to Ms. Burke’s hotel in Harlem, who learned of her body’s use 16 years too late to object.
The New York Times, by Nina Bernstein
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/15/nyregion/new-york-mass-graves-hart-island.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/27/nyregion/new-yorks-written-consent-bill-would-tighten-use-of-bodies-for-teaching.html