Connecticut woman’s battle with Harvard about more than photos
A Massachusetts judge recently dismissed the case of a Connecticut woman, who’d asked Harvard University to give her daguerreotypes of her family members the university has held since the mid-1800s. Those historic pictures were taken when the woman’s ancestors were enslaved in South Carolina, and had no say over their bodies, either as unpaid workers or as subjects of invasive photography.
On its face, the case was mostly decided on ownership of the photos. Did the Connecticut woman, Tamara Lanier, a retired chief probation officer for the state, have a right to ask for the photos as a descendant? And the case was decided on statutes of limitations.
With all due respect, the judge — and Harvard — have missed the point entirely.
At what point do we allow that Africans brought to this country as slaves became fully-fledged enfranchised citizens? Did that happen only after the Emancipation Proclamation?
The 13th Amendment? 14th? The Lanier family would like to know, and in an era of heightened awareness of the generational effect of slavery, the rest of us should, too.
For as long as anyone can remember, Mattye Lanier, an Alabama teacher and school administrator, was her family’s storyteller, with tales that stretched back to a man named Renty, who was stolen from the Congo and enslaved in South Carolina.
These are the stories Renty’s family told: In defiance of state law, Renty somehow got ahold of a Noah Webster blue back speller and taught himself to read. And then he taught others around him. Though the owner of his plantation insisted that enslaved people convert to Christianity, Renty worshipped as he saw fit. He was short of stature, and dignified. He urged his family to remember their roots.
One day in 1850, Renty and his daughter, Delia, were led into a South Carolina photo studio. Renty was told to disrobe, and his daughter was stripped to the waist so that a photographer who normally recorded portraits of society ladies could take their pictures.
The photographer did so at the request of a noted Harvard professor, Louis
Agassiz, and the haunting daguerreotypes are some of the earliest known photographic images of people held in slavery.
Agassiz’s earlier work focused on the natural world, but he began to devote his energies to proving his belief that the races came from multiple origins, and that people of European descent were superior to people of African descent. In one lecture, Agassiz compared the brain of a Black man or woman to that of a 7-month old white baby.
Renty’s and Delia’s portraits were meant to bolster Agassiz’s racist beliefs.
Prior to his committed devotion to scientific racism, Agassiz’s contributions were considerable. But his fake science undoubtedly contributed to the notion that equality was impossible. Later, when the U.S. government sought advice about how to deal with newly-freed slaves, one of their sources was Agassiz, who believed that people of different races should never mix.
To Agassiz (and his workplace, Harvard), Renty and Delia were lab rats.
Meanwhile, long after their deaths, their family gathered and handed babies and stories around the circle, telling and retelling until those babies could recite the stories, too. They handed Renty’s name down to five generations. When Mattye Lanier died in 2010, the mantle passed to Tamara Lanier, who began to flesh out those stories with research through census records, birth certificates, and slave indexes.
The Connecticut Historical Society helped her find some records. She traveled south to walk through ancient cemeteries. And when her research unearthed her family’s daguerreotypes in Harvard, she wrote to the university and shared what she knew about Renty and Delia. She hoped they’d have something to add, but no. The answer back added no new details to the family’s stories.
As recently as 2017, Harvard used Renty’s likeness for a book cover, and, that same year, in a program for a conference and slavery and universities and colleges, which Lanier attended. The program lauded Agassiz — making scant mention of his pursuit of racist pseudo-science — and mentioned that after the photograph was taken, Renty “returned to his invisibility.”
Only he didn’t. He was never invisible. After that conference, Lanier wrote asking for the daguerreotypes. Harvard declined. In March 2019, Lanier filed a lawsuit seeking the images,
and the 24-page complaint is stinging and soaring in its rhetoric.
In their answer to the lawsuit, Harvard’s lawyers argued that Lanier had no claim to the photos, as those belongs to the photographer (or, in this case, the photographer’s employer, the school). The answer also compared the circumstances under which Renty’s and Delia’s photos were taken with that of inmates, who don’t have ownership of photos taken of them while they’re in custody. And the school’s lawyers argued that there is a statute of limitations for seeking such claims.
Earlier this month, Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Camille F. Sarrouf Jr. agreed that Lanier has no claim to the daguerreotypes,
despite the awful circumstances under which they were created.
Consider the facts of the case: A man and his daughter are held in slavery, and images taken under circumstances over which they had no control in the name of bogus, racist “research” are now held by one of the world’s richest and most distinguished institutions of higher education. This case is about so much more than standing or ownership. It raises deeper, tough questions about ownership and personship.
Lanier will appeal in the name of her ancestors, including her mother. If laws are yesterday’s ethics, it’s time for these particular property laws to catch up.