Harvard Returns 1850 Photographs of Enslaved Americans to South Carolina Museum After Six-Year Legal Battle

After more than 175 years, two of the earliest known photographs of enslaved Americans, a father named Renty and his daughter Delia,  have finally come home. Their arrival at the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina marks a profound shift in how American institutions are being held accountable for the legacies of slavery.

The daguerreotypes were commissioned in 1850 by Louis Agassiz, a Harvard professor who used the images as evidence for his racist theories about Black inferiority. Renty and Delia were stripped to the waist and photographed as specimens, not as people. For over a century, their dignity remained trapped inside Harvard's archives.

That began to change through the determined legal fight of Tamara Lanier, who claims descent from Renty and sued Harvard in 2019. Though courts ruled she had no ownership rights, the case forced a reckoning. Harvard ultimately agreed to transfer the images to an appropriate institution,  a quiet but consequential concession. As Lanier's lawyer noted, the outcome "created a new legal duty for museums, colleges and other institutions to treat descendants of enslaved people and Indigenous communities respectfully."

The museum's president, Dr. Tonya Matthews, acknowledged the weight of the images, noting that the original intent was to showcase people as specimens, "so they are not easy to look at." Yet the goal now is that Renty and Delia be seen as fully human.

For Black Americans whose family histories disappear before 1870,  where ancestors are, as Lanier described, "mixed in with horses, pigs, farm equipment and other property",  moments like this carry enormous emotional weight.

When Lanier finally viewed the originals, she called it "a celebration of life." That reframing, from dehumanisation to celebration, is exactly the kind of shift this reckoning demands.

Link: NYTimes