Harvard University will relinquish its ownership of two haunting images of an enslaved father and his daughter after settling a six-year legal battle with a woman who says she is their descendant.
The images, two 175-year-old daguerreotypes that were taken for a Harvard professor and used as evidence for a discredited pseudoscientific theory of Black racial inferiority, will not, however, go to the woman who sued for them, Tamara Lanier. Instead, they are expected to be transferred, along with images of five other enslaved people, to the International African American Museum in Charleston, S.C., the state where the subjects were enslaved.
The settlement comes as Harvard deals with an onslaught of litigation as it tries to fight off President Trump’s efforts to cripple the university. Ms. Lanier cheered the outcome of her case, which will be announced on Wednesday.
“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.”
Harvard did not respond to requests for comment.
The legal fight over the images of the enslaved man, known as Renty, and his daughter, Delia, took on outsize importance as storied universities such as Harvard and Georgetown grappled with their ties to slavery. In 2016, Harvard Law School abandoned an 80-year-old shield based on the crest of a slaveholding family that helped endow the institution. That same year, Georgetown University decided to offer an advantage in admissions to descendants of enslaved people who were sold to fund the school.
But as museums began to repatriate human remains and sacred objects to Native American tribes, Harvard held on to the images of Renty and Delia. Ms. Lanier said she first reached out to the university about 15 years ago when she learned of the images. Renty resembled an ancestor whose legend had been passed down through family oral history, she said.
But Harvard did not treat her claim the way museums had treated tribal demands for ancestral artifacts until now.
“It’s a reckoning for all museums and institutions that currently hold plundered property,” Ms. Lanier said of the settlement.
The case attracted the attention of big names in the legal world, such as Benjamin Crump, who represented the families of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager killed in 2012 by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida, and George Floyd, a Black man murdered in 2020 by a white police officer in Minneapolis. Another lawyer on the case, Josh Koskoff, reached a landmark $73 million settlement with the gun maker Remington Firearms on behalf of families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre of 2012.
“One of the great accomplishments that Ms. Lanier, through her sheer persistence, has won here, is the shedding of light on history, on the true history, not just of her own family, but that of Harvard’s relationship to the truth,” Mr. Koskoff said.
The lawyers hope the settlement will lead to similar reckonings elsewhere.
“This case is so precedent-setting in so many ways,” Mr. Crump said. “It does leave a bright trail for not just us but the next generation of civil rights lawyers to take up the cross and to continue to defend Black humanity on every level.”
The partnership between the two lawyers began in an unlikely place: the set of a legal drama.
Mr. Crump had been filming a brief appearance in the 2017 film “Marshall,” which depicted an early case won by Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights lawyer and first Black Supreme Court justice. Mr. Koskoff’s father, a lawyer named Michael Koskoff, was a screenwriter on the film, and Mr. Crump persuaded him to take on Ms. Lanier’s case as co-counsel. Michael Koskoff died in 2019.
“The last day of his professional life was when we filed that lawsuit,” his son said.
The daguerreotypes were commissioned by Louis Agassiz, a Swiss-born zoologist and Harvard professor who is sometimes called the father of American natural science. Mr. Agassiz subscribed to polygenesis, the theory that Black and white people had different genetic origins. In 1850, Renty and his daughter Delia were stripped to the waist and photographed in a South Carolina studio; the images were then used as evidence for the professor’s racist theory.
Ms. Lanier sued Harvard in 2019, arguing that the school was profiting from the images. Renty’s image was featured, for instance, in a $40 anthropology book.
In 2021, a Massachusetts judge dismissed the lawsuit, arguing that if the enslaved subjects did not own the photographs, then neither did Ms. Lanier. But on appeal, the Massachusetts state supreme court ruled in Ms. Lanier’s favor the following year.
As she pursued her case, Ms. Lanier searched for Mr. Agassiz’s descendants, overcoming some initial reticence.
“If I found them, how would they treat me?” she asked. “How would they feel about me?”
After a New York Times story about the case in 2019, she received a message on social media from a descendant of the professor.
The families became so close that Mr. Agassiz’s descendants contacted Harvard on behalf of Ms. Lanier.
“I have vacationed with them,” she said. “I have spent time with them. We stay connected.”
Clyde McGrady reports for The Times on how race and identity is shaping American culture. He is based in Washington.
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