Harvard University will relinquish 175-year-old photographs believed to be the earliest taken of enslaved people.
apnews.com
05/28/25
BOSTON -- Harvard University will relinquish
175-year-old photographs believed to be the earliest taken of enslaved people to a South Carolina museum devoted to African American history as part of a settlement with one of the subjects' descendants.
The photos of the subjects identified by Tamara Lanier as her great-great-great-grandfather Renty, whom she calls “Papa Renty," and his daughter Delia will be transferred from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology to the International African American Museum in South Carolina, the state where they were enslaved in 1850 when the photos were taken, a lawyer for Lanier said Wednesday.
The settlement marks the end of a 15-year battle between Lanier and the nation’s most elite university to release the 19th-century “daguerreotypes," a precursor to modern-day photographs. Lanier’s attorney Joshua Koskoff told The Associated Press that the resolution is an “unprecedented” victory for descendants of those enslaved in the U.S. and praised his client's yearslong determination in pursuing justice for her ancestors.
I have been at odds with Harvard over the custody and care of my enslaved ancestors, and now I can rest assured that my enslaved ancestors will be traveling to a new home,” Ms. Lanier said in an interview. “They will be returning to their home state where this all began, and they will be placed in an institution that can celebrate their humanity.”
In a statement Wednesday, CEO of the International African American Museum Dr. Tonya M. Matthews called Harvard's relinquishing of the images a moment "175 years in the making.”
“The bravery, tenacity, and grace shown by Ms. Lanier throughout the long and arduous process of returning these critical pieces of Renty and Delia’s story to South Carolina is a model for us all,” she said.
The South Carolina museum has committed to working with Lanier and including her in decisions about how the story of the images will be told.
“It's not an improvement just to move them from one closet in a mighty institution to another. And so really, the real importance of this is to allow these images to breathe, to allow the story — the full story — to be told not by a conflicted player in the story, which Harvard was from the beginning,” Koskoff said.
The attorney said “everybody has the right to tell the story of their own families.”
"That’s the least, most basic right we might have," he said. “To be able to tell the story of her family with a museum that will allow her to tell it — I mean, you can’t do any better than that."
In Lanier's lawsuit, she asked for Harvard to acknowledge its complicity in slavery, listen to Lanier’s oral family history and pay an unspecified sum in damages. An undisclosed financial settlement was part of the resolution with Harvard announced Wednesday, but Koskoff said Harvard still hasn't publicly acknowledged Lanier's connection to them or its connection to perpetuating slavery in the U.S., Koskoff said.
“That is just left unanswered by Harvard,” he said.
He said Lanier isn't expecting or waiting to hear from the institution, but that the settlement speaks for itself.
“In the end, the truth will find you — you can you can only hide from it for so long," he said. "Yes, history is written by the winners. But over time, you know, those winners look like losers sometimes.”
