SLAVE $HAME
Harvard sued over 1850 pix of woman’s kin
The great-great-great granddaughter of a South Carolina slave, intent on ending the 169-year exploitation of her ancestors, sued Harvard University for using demeaning photos of her family to turn a profit.
Plaintiff Tamara Lanier charged in her Wednesday lawsuit that the 1850 daguerreotypes of family patriarch Papa Renty and his daughter Delia were taken to illustrate a racist theory that blacks were inferior to whites — and then exploited decades later to fill the college coffers.
Despite the pictures’ sordid past, the Ivy League school charged a “hefty fee” for anyone wishing to reproduce the images and used an image of Papa Renty on the cover of a $40 book titled “From Site to Sight: Anthropology, Photography and the Power of Imagery,” the Massachusetts state court lawsuit alleged.
“For years, Papa Renty’s slave owners profited from his suffering,” said Lanier. “It’s time for Harvard to stop doing the same thing to our family. … Harvard’s refusal to honor our family’s history by acknowledging our lineage and its own shameful past is an insult to Papa Renty’s life and memory.”
The photos, believed to be the first shots of slaves in the United States, were taken to illustrate polygenism — a long-discounted theory used to justify slavery prior to the Civil War and segregation during Reconstruction and beyond. Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz found Papa Renty and his daughter while visiting Southern plantations in search of racially “pure” slaves brought to the U.S. from Africa.
Renty was forced to strip naked and his child ordered to strip to the waist after Agassiz plucked the pair off a Southern plantation, the lawsuit said
“These images were taken under duress, ordered by a Harvard professor bent on proving the inferiority of African-Americans,” said Lanier’s lawyer Michael Koskoff. “Harvard has no right to keep them, let alone profit from them. It’s about time the university accepted responsibility for its shameful history and for the way it has treated Papa Renty and his family.”
The lawsuit alleges that Harvard has ignored Lanier’s repeated entreaties to stop collecting licensing fees on the photos, while seeking return of the images and unspecified damages from the Ivy League school. Lanier’s quest to recover the photos began back in 2011.
“To Agassiz, Renty and [daughter] Delia were nothing more than research specimens,” the suit alleged. “The violence of compelling them to participate in a degrading exercise designed to prove their own subhuman status would not have occurred to him, let alone mattered.”
The Lanier family lore has it that Renty actually taught himself and other slaves to read, while conducting secret Bible readings and religious studies on the plantation.
Harvard spokesman Jonathan Swain said the university had not yet seen the court papers and would have no comment.
The century-old photos were long forgotten until their rediscovery in 1976 in a corner cabinet of the Peabody Museum attic on the Harvard campus. The school was soon charging for use of the family’s photographs.
“These photographs make it clear that Harvard benefited from slavery and continues to benefit now,” said civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, co-lead counsel for the plaintiff. “By my calculation, Renty is now 169 years a slave. When will Harvard finally set him free?”