‘Harvard is exploiting my slave ancestors’
In the winter of 1850 an enslaved man and his daughter were stripped to the waist and forced to pose for photographs ordered by a Harvard professor whose racial theories served to justify slavery and segregation before they were debunked by science.
Yet more than a century and a half later Harvard University continues to profit ‘‘shamelessly’’ from that dark chapter in its history by refusing to restore those photographs to the slaves’ living descendants, according to a lawsuit filed by a woman who has identified them as her ancestors.
Tamara Lanier, 54, says that she was raised on story, proudly passed down through the generations, of a man named Renty Taylor, or Papa Renty.
He had been taken to the United States from Congo and made the property of Benjamin Franklin Taylor, of South Carolina, she said.
Possessed both of determination and a fierce intelligence, he had taught himself to read and write in defiance of state laws and became a teacher to those around him, giving Bible readings and helping other slaves to achieve literacy, Lanier says in her legal action.
His grandson, Renty Taylor III, was transferred to the household of the Thompson family in Alabama, she said.
His descendants included slaves,
asharecroppers, civil rights activists and Lanier’s mother, Mattye Thompson-Lanier, who recited the story for the last time on her deathbed in 2010. ‘‘Always remember we’re Taylors,’’ she is claimed to have said.
After her mother’s death, Lanier began to compile a family tree and was helped by a fellow amateur genealogist, who told her one day that he had found not only her ancestors but photographs of them. In 1976, 15 daguerreotypes from 1850, apparently the earliest photographs of slaves, were found in a filing cabinet in the attic of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. One was captioned ‘‘Renty’’ originally from Congo, and another his daughter ‘‘Delia’’.
They had been commissioned by the Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz, a Swiss scientist who made his name with a careful classification of species of Brazilian fish. At Harvard he pursued the theory that black and white people were of different species. Agassiz was said to have forced the slaves to pose naked.
In a paper that used the photographs as supporting evidence, he said that Africans were submissive, obsequious and possessed of ‘‘a peculiar indifference to the advantages afforded by a civilised society’’.
Lanier argues that Harvard refused to acknowledge Renty as her ancestor and continued to exploit the photographs after they were discovered, using his portrait on the cover of a book that it sells about the use of photography in anthropology.
‘‘Renty is 169 years a slave by our calculation,’’ Benjamin Crump, her lawyer, said. ‘‘How long will it be before Harvard finally frees Renty?’’
However, some scholars have cautioned that Lanier’s claim could be hard to prove in court.
Gregg Hecimovich, who has studied slave daguerreotypes, said that an inventory from the Taylor plantation seemed to suggest that there was a Renty and a ‘‘Big Renty’’ at the head of separate families. ‘‘It would be very hard to make a slamdunk case,’’ Hecimovich told the
Harvard did not respond to a request for comment yesterday.