Harvard returns early images of enslaved Americans for a year after a legal dispute
Harvard University has released ownership of the earliest photographs of enslaved African Americans that scholars believe are in the first, engaging in an eight-year dispute with the sole descendant of the subject captured in the image.
Under a confidential settlement announced Wednesday, Cambridge, Massachusetts said it would transfer 15 Daguerreotypes around 1850, long staying at the Peabody Archaeology Museum and the Ethnology Museum, to the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, South Carolina,
The Charleston Museum plans to collaborate with Tamara Lanier, a woman behind the legal dispute, to showcase images of early copper plate making. In legal documents, Lanier claims that the images depict her great-great-great-grandfather Renty and his daughter Delia, while independent studies confirm her genealogical connection to their family tree.
The dispute began in 2019, when Lanier sued Harvard for arguing that the university had no legal requirements for the image she described as “dehumanizing” and commissioned without consent for Swiss-born biologist Louis Agassiz, a former former Harvard professor. (Harvard denies Lanier’s initial request to return the photos in 2017.)
Agassiz is now widely circulated, a supporter of the controversial theory about white superiority, once justified the slavery system in the United States.
In 2022, when a Massachusetts court ruled that ownership of objects remained in the case of photographers rather than subjects, Lanier was allowed to pursue damage based on the “emotional distress” of Harvard’s use of images in marketing materials. She was given the opportunity to file further claims in another ruling in 2023.
In a press conference, Lanier’s lawyers called the restoration a “strange victory for the descendants of slavery”, believed that the rewards came at a critical moment at Harvard and called for fairness as the Trump administration’s goal was to be frozen by the Trump administration and $2.2 billion in funding, related to the handling of the Palestinian solidarity campaign. (Lanier joined with descendants of Agassiz, who supported their efforts to return them.)
Harvard University said in a statement surrounding the solution that it has been looking for options to place daguerreotypes in a more suitable and public environment for years. Now, their placement at the Southern Museum marks a new phase of work. No financial terms of the settlement were disclosed.
