What are believed to be the earliest known photographs of enslaved Americans are images of a father, Renty, and his daughter Delia that were commissioned in 1850 and used to advance a professor’s racist theories.
More than 175 years later, and after a long court fight over possession of the photos, a museum in South Carolina on Wednesday will honor the arrival of the images in the state, where the portraits were shot and the subjects were originally enslaved.
The reception this afternoon at the International African American Museum in Charleston, S.C., which will include a woman who says she is one of Renty’s descendants, will herald the transfer of 15 fragile daguerreotypes from Harvard University. The school quietly relinquished ownership of them late last year.
The handoff was the culmination of a six‑year legal battle by Tamara Lanier, the woman who says she is part of the subjects’ lineage.
“The cultural property of my enslaved ancestors will find a fitting final resting place, one that restores their humanity and preserves their legacy,” Ms. Lanier said Monday.
The portraits were originally commissioned by Louis Agassiz, a Swiss-born zoologist and Harvard professor, who believed that Black and white people had different genetic origins, and that Black people were racially inferior. Renty and Delia were stripped to the waist and photographed in a South Carolina studio, and the professor used the images as evidence for his theories.
The images were long overlooked in a Harvard museum until 1976, when their discovery was hailed because of their age.
Ms. Lanier sued Harvard in 2019, seeking to acquire the images and arguing that the school was profiting from them. Ultimately, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that she had no ownership right to them, but it allowed her to proceed with her claim that Harvard had caused her emotional harm in its interactions with her.
Harvard said last year that it was committed to finding an appropriate home for the images. It also said it could not confirm that Ms. Lanier was related to Renty and Delia. Ms. Lanier has said that Renty resembled an ancestor whose legend had been passed down through family oral history.
She searched for Mr. Agassiz’s descendants, and one of them contacted her after The New York Times published an article about the case in 2019. The families became so close that Mr. Agassiz’s descendants contacted Harvard on Ms. Lanier’s behalf.
Last spring, as Harvard began facing an intense effort by the Trump administration to cripple the university with investigations and threats to pull federal funding, the school agreed as part of a settlement to hand over the images to an institution.
A Harvard spokesman, Jason Newton, said in a statement Tuesday that the university has eagerly supported the museum’s work with the photographs, including making a financial contribution, “to honor their legacies and humanity in ways that contribute to the deeper perspective and understanding of our nation’s history.” Josh Koskoff, a lawyer for Ms. Lanier, said the outcome of the case created a new legal duty for museums, colleges and other institutions to treat descendants of enslaved people and Indigenous communities respectfully and to take seriously their claims tied to ancestors’ property and images.
For many Black people, conducting family research often means running into what is known as the “1870 brick wall.” That’s because before that year the U.S. census viewed enslaved people as property in records like inventories and wills. Ms. Lanier said doing such genealogical work is a painful process.
“My ancestors are mixed in with horses, pigs, farm equipment and other property,” she said.
Besides the portraits of Renty and Delia, the images given to the museum are of people named Alfred, Jack, Drana (daughter of Jack), Fassena and Jem. The originals will be stored out of public view to limit their exposure to light, but reproductions will be part of an exhibit in October, the museum said.
Dr. Tonya Matthews, the museum’s president and chief executive, said that the original intent of the images was to showcase people as specimens, “so they are not easy to look at.”
But she hoped that the subjects will be seen as humans and more than haunting images used for racist purposes.
Transport of the images required special care, she said. A private courier drove the crates directly from Harvard’s collections facility in Cambridge, Mass., to the museum’s collections site in Charleston, stopping only for necessary breaks. The museum’s registrar traveled with the shipment, and the crates carried GPS trackers so they could be continually monitored.
Dr. Matthews recalled that she felt a weight of responsibility when she first saw the images at Harvard last year but that “there was also just a little bit of triumph.”
Ms. Lanier said she hoped her case would encourage more Black people to document the oral history passed down through generations.
If you have an elder in your household, “sit down, talk with them, listen to them,” to get a firsthand account of the history that they lived, Ms. Lanier said.
“That’s who we are, not what’s written about us.”
Clyde McGrady reports for The Times on how race and identity shape American culture.
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