The pictures feature some of the country’s oldest photographs of enslaved people.
However, a multi-year legal battle has raged over the descendants of an African man known as Renty and his daughter Delia over the value of slavery.
The institution that held the 175-year-old photographs, Harvard University, reached a settlement that would end its ownership of the images on Wednesday, drawing to a close.
The International African American Museum, a newly opened educational institution in Charleston, South Carolina, will be the recipient of the daguerreotypes, which have a special connection to the transatlantic slave trade because it was the first port of entry for enslaved people entering North America in the past.
Tamara Lanier, a woman from Connecticut who claims she is Renty’s great-great-great-granddaughter, brought the settlement as the crowning the crowning achievement of the lawsuit.
She filed a lawsuit against Harvard in 2019 for the “wrongful seizure, possession, and expropriation” of the images, which are part of a collection of 15 daguerrotypes created to support white supremacist ideas.
In the lawsuit, Lanier claimed that Harvard made money off of the photos from licensing deals and reprints of books and conferences’ covers. She had requested that Harvard pay damages for the photos, acknowledge their ties to slavery in the US, and return them to her.
In addition to the settlement on Wednesday, Harvard did not confirm Lanier’s claims regarding the photographs. However, it did agree to an undisclosed financial arrangement.
The agreement marked a turning point in the fight against slavery, according to Lanier’s legal team and others.
The International African American Museum’s CEO, Tonya M. Matthews, praised Ms. Lanier’s bravery, tenacity, and grace throughout the lengthy and difficult process of returning these significant pieces of Renty and Delia’s story to South Carolina.
The museum vowed to consult with Lanier about how Renty and Delia’s portraits should be displayed.
origins of the images
In South Carolina, people were shot in the daguerreotypes in 1850 using people from forced agricultural labor sites called plantations.
The images were taken by Joseph Zealy, a photographer hired by a Harvard biologist named Louis Agassiz, in order to support a racist theory. According to Agassiz, “polygenism” is the fabricated notion that white people were genetically superior to other races and that different races came from different ancestries.
Renty, Delia, and other forcibly enslaved people were stripped to their waists for the portrait-style daguerreotypes. Then, with some cameras facing the way, others with profiles, they were all captured.
People are forced to stand completely naked in front of the camera in several of the daguerrotypes.
The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard eventually housed the daguerreotypes, which remained in the dust for nearly a century. The images were discovered in a museum cabinet in 1976, however, by a museum curator named Ellie Reichlin, who gained them new recognition.
Renty’s image, for instance, was used on the backs of books, at conferences, and in articles, which raised questions about whether the reprints were dehumanizing him repeatedly and who ought to own his image.
According to Harvard University, which has long claimed profit from images like Renty and Delia’s, it only charges a “nominal” fee for reprints.
Lanier said she first discovered Renty and Delia’s images while researching the history of her family. Before discovering the daguerrotypes, she claimed to have grown up with “Papa Renty” stories.
Lanier claims that she was repeatedly rejected when she attempted to tell Harvard about her family history. She eventually filed a lawsuit, contending that Harvard could not be the owner of the pictures because they were subject to restraint.
According to the lawsuit, “To Agassiz, Renty, and Delia were nothing more than research specimens.” He would not have thought it would have mattered if he had been forced to participate in a degrading exercise to demonstrate their own subhuman status.
On Lanier’s behalf, dozens of Agassiz’s heirs wrote a letter to Harvard to “acknowledge and redress the harm done by Louis Agassiz.”
Years of litigation
In the beginning, Harvard fought to dismiss Lanier’s lawsuit, and in 2021, Middlesex County Superior Court Judge Camille Sarrouf Jr. sided with the university.
Judge Sarrouf stated that the photographer had no control over the copies produced, despite acknowledging the vile conditions under which the photos were taken.
Whatever the origins of the photograph may be, the law, in its current form, does not grant the subject of a photo a property interest, according to Sarrouf.
The Massachusetts Supreme Court, however, reached a different conclusion in 2022, choosing Lanier as the case. It cleared the way for more legal hearings on the subject, allowing for further legal proceedings in 2021 to dismiss Lanier’s claim.
The state court criticized Harvard for its “complicity in the horrifying actions surrounding the creation of the daguerreotypes” and wrote, “We conclude that Harvard’s present obligations cannot be divorced from its past abuses.”
The court determined that the university should have taken “reasonable care” in responding to her concerns once Lanier had explained her understanding that the daguerreotypes accurately depicted her ancestors.
Since then, a lawsuit has been filed regarding the photos’ fate, but Harvard itself has faced additional difficulties in the wake of the state supreme court’s decision.
In response to President Donald Trump’s growing conflict with the prestigious Ivy League institution, all of its federal contracts and grants have been frozen or canceled over the past few months.
The school has denied using discriminatory practices for student admissions and hiring, as the Republican leader has claimed.
Harvard cited its obligation to protect its academic freedom as the Trump administration’s demands for more control over campus activities. Trump has also been criticized for attempting to stifle protest and dissent on US campuses.
The ongoing political standoff led to Wednesday’s settlement. The settlement was an “unprecedented” victory, Lanier’s lawyer Joshua Koskoff told The Associated Press.
“To have a case that dates back 175 years, to have control over images of enslaved people — that’s never happened before,” Koskoff said.
He did, however, express regret over Lanier’s assertions about the pictures and slavery-related claims that the school did not address them directly.
Meanwhile, Harvard said in a statement that it has “long been eager to place the Zealy Daguerreotypes with another museum or other public institution” to increase their accessibility.
Source: Aljazeera
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