‘Harvard is exploiting my slave ancestors’

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 slam-dunk case,’’ Hecimovich told the New York Times.

Harvard did not respond to a request for comment yesterday.

– The Times