Ending a six-year battle that stirred ethical and legal debates about the ownership of photographs taken under duress, Harvard University has surrendered its claim to 15 daguerreotypes at the center of a lawsuit brought by Tamara Lanier, a descendant of enslaved individuals.
Lanier sued the school for wrongful possession and expropriation in 2019, two years after discovering that photographs held at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology depicted her great-great-great grandfather Renty and his daughter, Delia, who were enslaved on a plantation in South Carolina. Commissioned by Harvard professor Louis Agassiz and taken by Joseph T. Zealy in 1850, the daguerreotypes — an early form of photography exposed on copper plates — show Renty and Delia stripped to the waist. The images were created as part of so-called “experiments” in support of pseudoscientific theories of White racial superiority of which Agassiz was a proponent. (Due to their dehumanizing nature, Hyperallergic has decided not to reproduce the photographs in question.)
Now, the photos of Delia, Renty, and others in Harvard’s custody for nearly two centuries are expected to be transferred to the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, in a hard-fought settlement that Lanier called “a turning point in American history.”
“To quote the late Martin Luther King Jr., ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,’” Lanier said in a press conference this morning, May 28. “This is a moment in history when the sons and daughters of stolen ancestors can stand with pride and rightfully proclaim a victory for reparations.”
In a 2022 interview with Hyperallergic Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian, Lanier recalled how she had grown up hearing stories from her mother about “Papa Renty,” their ancestor who taught himself and other enslaved people to read and write in defiance of racist laws. After her mother’s death, Lanier confirmed her ties to Renty and Delia via genealogical research.
Lanier first asked Harvard to return the images in 2017, a request the school denied, questioning her ancestral claims. Her lawsuit was initially dismissed by a court that cited precedents establishing photographs as “the property of the photographer.” Lanier’s legal team appealed; Harvard filed a motion to dismiss, again.
A major breakthrough came in 2022, when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court dismissed Lanier’s property-related claims but ruled that she could move forward with a lawsuit based on “emotional distress” caused by Harvard’s continued use of the images in promotional and other materials. Then, in 2023, a Middlesex County Superior Court judge paved the way for the case to move to discovery and trial.