Harvard sued for photographs taken for racist scientist

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A woman is suing Harvard University for taking advantage of images of her ancestors, enslaved people who were forcibly stripped and photographed as part of a racist scientist’s search.

Tamara Lanier is the great-great-great-granddaughter of Renty, who was born in the Congo River Basin, kidnapped and taken to South Carolina in the early 1800s, where he was enslaved on a plantation cotton, reports the Washington Post.

According to Ms Lanier’s lawsuit, the university continues to profit from the atrocity by using images taken of Renty and her daughter Delia and charging a fee to allow others to use them. Ms. Lanier seeks ownership of the photos and unspecified damages.

Renty and her daughter, Delia, were photographed in 1850, and their daguerreotypes are believed to be the first ever taken from slaves.

Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz, who died in 1873, spent much of his career trying to prove black people were an inferior race and took photos of Ms Lanier’s ancestors as part of his research.

Renty, Delia, and other slave men and women were stripped naked and forced to pose for the photograph, while being subjected to measurement of every part of the body, including their buttocks and genitals.

Agassiz left his papers at Harvard when he died, and the decades-lost images were found in an attic at Harvard’s Peabody Museum in 1976.

Until last summer, a neighborhood near the Harvard campus was named Agassiz, and in 2019 Harvard described Agassiz as “charismatic [and] a great systematician, paleontologist and renowned professor of natural history, ”according to the lawsuit.

According to the Boston Globe, the images of Renty and Delia were used in 2017 on the cover of a book and for promotional material for a Harvard-hosted conference on slavery.

“Harvard kept Renty and Delia in slavery for 170 years,” Ben Crump, Ms. Lanier’s attorney, said in a Massachusetts Supreme Court hearing on Monday. “We implore this court not to sentence them to death as Harvard property for all eternity.”

More than three dozen of Agassiz’s descendants signed a letter of support to Ms Lanier, saying, “For too many years we have ignored Agassiz’s role in promoting a pseudoscientific rationale for white supremacy. … Now is the time to name, recognize and repair the wrong caused by Louis Agassiz.

Ms. Lanier says that if her costume is successful, “We’re going to sit down as a family and talk about what’s best for Renty and Delia. We want the world to get to know the real Renty and Delia, ”she said. “We want the world to know that we are proud of them and honored to be their descendants.”

The Independent has contacted Harvard University for comment.

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