Harvard University has agreed to settle a deeply emotional dispute over who has the rights to images of enslaved Africans taken in 1850 by a professor who sought to support a racist theory.
The daguerrotypes, a precursor to modern photographs, are considered to be the earliest known images of Black American slaves, who were posed nude and semi-nude “without consent, dignity or compensation,” a 2019 lawsuit stated.
The Cambridge institution has agreed to relinquish the images and has offered plaintiff Tamara Lanier a confidential monetary settlement.
Lanier says she is a descendant of a slave known only by his first name, Renty, who was photographed nude, and his daughter Delia, who was photographed nude from the waist up, in images commissioned by Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz as supposed evidence of Black inferiority.The images were taken in South Carolina, and Lanier is advocating for them to be transferred to the International African American Museum there.
Lanier accused the university of using them for advertising and commercial purposes, and denounced the use of Renty’s image on a cover of a $40 anthropology book it published in 2017.
“Since Black Americans were first brought to this country in chains, our pain and trauma have been exploited for capitalistic gain,” said Lanier.
Lanier claimed rights to the images 15 years ago, but Harvard has long-disputed the claim that she is Renty’s great-great-great-granddaughter.
“As descendants of slaves, familial history and well-documented genealogy are a luxury that many Black Americans do not have,” Lanier said, who relied on her family’s oral history to determine the connection in lineage.
In a statement on the settlement, Harvard said they have “long been eager” to steward “the daguerrotypes in a responsible manner.”
In his time Agassiz, a Swiss-born biologist, was a renowned scientist who worked in geology.
But Lanier’s attorney Ben Crump said Agassiz also supported polygenism, which was “used to justify both the ongoing enslavement of Black people prior to the Civil War and their segregation afterward.”
The daguerrotypes were in the possession of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology to date.
“Harvard played a role in the darkest chapter in American history,” Lanier said. “This is a small step in the right direction towards fully acknowledging that history and working to rectify it.”
The stain of Agassiz’s work has been controversial elsewhere, too.
He had an elementary school named after him near Harvard — but local residents successfully demanded the name be changed to honor a long-serving Black principal Maria Louise Baldwin in 2002, citing his scientific racism.
