Connecticut slave receives funeral over 200 years after his death (Video)

A slave who died over 200 years ago has finally been properly laid to rest.

The slave, whose name was Fortune, died in 1798, but he never received a funeral or a burial. At least, he did not until this Thursday.

Fortune’s remains lay in a coffin at Connecticut’s state Capitol rotunda Thursday morning, an honor only bestowed upon a select few. His body remained there until police escorted them to St. John's Episcopal Church in Waterbury, the very same church in which Fortune was baptized in 1797, according to CNN.

The funeral service was attended by hundreds, who all gathered to pay respects to a man they had never met.

"Our brother Mr. Fortune has been remembered, and it is with restored dignity his bones shall be buried," Rev. Amy D. Welin of St. John's Episcopal Church said at Fortune’s service, reports the Huffington Post. "We bury Mr. Fortune not as a slave, but as a child of God who is blessed."

In his life, Fortune, his wife, and their four children were owned by bone surgeon Dr. Preserved Porter, who owned a farm in Waterbury. After Fortune’s death at age 55, Porter preserved his bones to use for anatomical study.

Fortune’s skeletal remains were passed down in the Porter family until one of Dr. Porter’s descendants decided to sell the remains Mattatuck Museum, where they were on display from the 1940s to the 1970s.

The museum wanted to lay Fortune to rest for some time, but researchers feared they still had too much to learn from his bones to do so. It was only after they took recent CT scans and created a 3D image of what Fortune might have looked like in life that they felt they were able to give him a proper burial.

“He’s left a legacy, that slaves were as human as anyone else,” Maxine Watts of the Mattatuck Museum told NBC News.

Fortune’s body was buried Thursday in a Waterbury cemetery that is filled with many distinguished citizens.

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