Harvard Relinquishes Photographs of Enslaved People in Historic Settlement

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.

Throughout the process, Harvard’s defense team argued against restitution of the photographs to Lanier’s family and insisted that the school had a property stake in the pictures. Decades earlier, Harvard had infamously threatened to sue artist Carrie Mae Weems over her appropriation of Zealy’s images in her series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–96), which aims to reclaim the subjects’ dignity and humanity.

Hyperallergic has contacted Harvard University and the International African American Museum for comment.

In today’s conference, Lanier’s attorneys Ben Crump and Josh Koskoff acknowledged the meaningful timing of the settlement, citing Harvard’s ongoing legal fight with the Trump administration — which froze over $2 billion in research funds for the school and attempted to block international students, largely in response to Palestine solidarity protests on campus.

“It is so critically important, when we think about this epidemic of white supremacy that has resurfaced and reared its ugly head, that we know there are champions for equal justice that stand up to the enemies of equality,” Crump said this morning. “There’s never a wrong time to do the right thing.”

The landmark case has drawn global attention. In 2021, Hyperallergic released a special issue on Lanier’s fight to “Free Renty,” publishing 12 scholarly endorsements of an amicus brief in support of Lanier by author and Brown University Professor Ariella Aïsha Azoulay.

Earlier this year, Lanier published a memoir titled From These Roots, which details her journey to tracing her family lineage and her struggle to reclaim the photographs.

In today’s conference, Lanier said Harvard’s agreement to relinquish the daguerreotypes was a “victory for ethical stewardship.”

“This case affirms a powerful truth: that voices of descendants matter, that oral histories passed down through the generations of Black families carry weight and wisdom,” Lanier said. “That we, the children of those who endured unspeakable cruelties, are the rightful stewards of our own family stories and sacred legacies.”

“Institutions that hold the spoils of slavery must do more than reflect — they must act,” Lanier continued. “Justice requires no less.”