Harvard prosecuted for using a slave photograph

Connecticut woman sued Harvard University for allegedly taking advantage of a photo of her family's patriarch, an African slave who was forced to pose nude, which historians consider one of the oldest images of people enslaved to the United States.

Tamara Lanier, a former probation officer in Norwich, said she has repeatedly asked Harvard since 2011 to stop using the daguerreotypes of a slave named Renty and her daughter Delia. The photos were commissioned by a Harvard professor, Louis Agassiz, a biologist who used these images to reinforce his argument of white superiority.

"For years, Papa Renty's slave owners have taken advantage of his suffering," Lanier said in a statement. "It's time for Harvard to stop doing the same thing to our family."

The photo, last used on the cover of an anthropology book of 2017, depicts an old black man with white hair. His bones are visible and he looks directly at the camera. He appears naked since the waist.

The photo was taken in 1850 in South Carolina, where Renty was enslaved on the B.F. Taylor plantation, according to Lanier.

In his lawsuit in Middlesex Superior Court, Lanier asks Harvard to return the daguerreotypes and stop authorizing the images.

Harvard officials could not be contacted immediately for a comment on Wednesday.

The lawsuit raises new questions about how US universities should address their links with slavery and deal with the racist views championed by past presidents, benefactors and eminent professors.

In 1838, Jesuit priests sold nearly 300 slaves to save Georgetown University from financial disaster and to repay his debt. The descendants of the slaves demanded restitution. In 2017, Colby College announced that it would name a building for a former slave who worked for 37 years as a school guard.

As a result of the student protests, Harvard agreed in 2016 to remove a shield used by his law school, which included sheaves of golden wheat, a reference to a donor's coat of arms.

The images of Renty and her daughter were forgotten until 1976, when they were found in a corner cabinet in the loft of the Harvard Peabody Museum. A museum employee expressed concern for the families of the men and women represented, but Harvard made no effort to find his descendants, according to the lawsuit.

Lanier wrote to Drew Faust, then president of Harvard, in 2011 to clarify his ancestors and his links with Renty and Delia. But Lanier said she failed to get the photos.

Since then, Lanier has stated that she was collecting documents about her ancestors and had consulted with genealogy experts to validate her links with Renty and Delia.

In 2012, Harvard rejected a request for use of footage from a Swiss group organizing an exhibition on Agassiz and its racism. The Peabody Museum invoked its policy against displaying nude people's exploitation images, but also told Swiss organizers that photos were considered "sensitive."

Renty's image is also displayed on campus as part of an exhibition entitled "Slavery in the Hands of Harvard" at the Center for Governmental and International Studies. A distorted version of Renty's daguerreotype is associated with a mughothot of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., who was arrested in 2009 after struggling to open the door of his home in Cambridge.

According to his research and family tradition, Lanier thinks that Renty was his great-great-great-grandfather. He was captured by slave traders and sold to a plantation in South Carolina, she said.

Renty was taught to read and helped other slaves learn, Lanier said. He also held secret Bible readings and a Bible study on planting, adding even more insult to the use of his image to suggest a black inferiority, Lanier said.

"Papa Renty was a proud and kind man who, like so many men, women and child slaves, endured years of unimaginable horrors," said Lanier. "Harvard's refusal to honor our family's history by recognizing our lineage and our own shameful past is an insult to Papa Renty's life and memory."

Agassiz was a Swiss-born scientist who came to Harvard in 1847 to teach zoology. He is considered one of the founders of the modern American scientific tradition and is quoted in Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species".

But he did not believe that humans all belonged to the same species. He commissioned 15 images of male and female slaves in the South, presented from several angles, to classify and analyze racial differences. His theory and science were used to justify slavery and subsequent segregation, and Harvard has not yet sufficiently refuted his work, according to the lawsuit.

"These images were taken under duress, ordered by a Harvard professor, ready to prove the inferiority of African Americans," said Michael Koskoff, Lanier's lawyer. "Harvard is not allowed to keep them, let alone take advantage of them. It is time for the university to take responsibility for its shameful story and the way it treated Papa Renty and his family. "