Harvard University is being sued over photographs of African slaves. The descendants of the man from the photograph are suing the university.
Tamara Lanier, a direct descendant is demanding that Harvard turn over the images, recognize her lineage and pay unspecified damages.
The enslaved African man named Renty and his daughter Delia were stripped and forced to pose for images commissioned by a Swiss-born Harvard professor who espoused a theory that Africans and African-Americans were inferior to whites.
170 years later, Renty and Delia “remain enslaved” by the Ivy League university which is being accused of the “wrongful seizure, possession and expropriation” of the photographs of his great-great-great-granddaughter, Tamara, who wants the photos back.
Lanier, who refers to her great-great-great grandfather as “Papa Renty,” said she learned from years of research and oral history from her family that he was born in Africa, kidnapped by slave merchants and enslaved on a South Carolina plantation. He taught himself and other slaves to read and led secret Bible readings and study on the plantation.
The images were long forgotten until an employee of Harvard’s Peabody Museum discovered them in the museum’s attic in 1976, the lawsuit said.
The employee, Ellie Reichlin, was concerned for the families of the men and women in the images but it was reported that Harvard made no effort to locate their descendants.
Lanier continued gathering evidence of her heritage and, in 2016, contacted the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, with her story.
She went to Cambridge for an interview but later learned that her story would not be told because of “concerns the Peabody Museum has raised,” the suit said.
The lawsuit claims the photos of Renty and Delia were taken a few years after Harvard had recruited Agassiz, whose field of study was a branch of zoology that grouped living things based on anatomical characteristics and hierarchical order.
The lawsuit said, “It was an act of both love and resistance that Renty and Delia’s kin kept their memories and stories alive for well over a century. It is unconscionable that Harvard will not allow Ms. Lanier to, at long last, bring Renty and Delia home.”
