May 29, 2025 Story by: Publisher
Harvard University will transfer two rare 1850 daguerreotypes of enslaved South Carolinians to a Charleston museum, ending a long legal fight by a descendant who claims the images.
In a settlement announced May 28, 2025, the Ivy League school agreed to relinquish ownership of the photographs – believed to be the earliest ever made of enslaved people – to the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, the very state where the subjects lived as slaves when they were photographed.
The deal resolves a years-long dispute with Tamara Lanier of Connecticut, who says she is the great-great-great-granddaughter of the two subjects and had sued Harvard to reclaim the images of her ancestors.
1850 Slave Portraits and Louis Agassiz
The photographs in question are daguerreotypes – an early photographic process – taken in 1850 of a Black South Carolina man named Renty Taylor (whom Lanier calls “Papa Renty”) and his daughter Delia.
They were commissioned by Louis Agassiz, a famous Harvard biologist and founder of the university’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Agassiz, by the mid-19th century a celebrated naturalist often called the “creator of American science,” also embraced deeply racist theories of polygenism (the idea that human races have separate origins).
He traveled to South Carolina seeking so‑called “pure” African-born slaves to photograph and measure as evidence for his theories. In a seaside studio, Renty, Delia and several other enslaved men and women were stripped and posed in a series of images and measured down to the inch – all without their consent.
These daguerreotypes are believed to be the earliest known photographs ever taken of enslaved Americans.
After Agassiz’s death in 1873, the pictures eventually ended up in the Harvard archives and were essentially forgotten until they were rediscovered in the Harvard Peabody Museum in 1976. (At the time, the Museum of Comparative Zoology was renamed the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.)
In recent decades the images were sometimes displayed or used in publications – often as cautionary artifacts of racism – but Harvard maintained they were legally its property as the heirs of the photographer.
The Lanier Lawsuit
Lanier first learned of Renty and Delia’s images after her mother’s 2010 death, when a friend helped her identify them from Harvard’s archives. Believing the couple to be her ancestors (family lore held that Renty was kidnapped from the Congo and enslaved in the Carolinas), Lanier launched a campaign demanding Harvard turn over the photos.
In 2019 she filed a state lawsuit alleging that Harvard’s possession of the images amounted to “wrongful seizure, possession and expropriation” of her family property. Her complaint said the portraits were taken “without Renty’s and Delia’s consent and therefore unlawfully retained,” and accused Harvard of exploiting the images by, for example, demanding hefty licensing fees to publish them.
Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, one of Lanier’s lawyers, put it bluntly: “Harvard benefited from slavery then and continues to benefit now,” he said. “Renty is 169 years a slave. When will Harvard finally set him free?”.
Harvard moved to dismiss Lanier’s claims. In 2021 a Massachusetts appeals court agreed that the photographs were legally “works for hire” belonging to the photographer (and thus Harvard), not the subjects.
But the court allowed Lanier to continue pursuing other claims. In 2022 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court partly revived Lanier’s suit. It affirmed that she could not claim outright ownership of the prints, but held that she could seek damages for the emotional distress Harvard’s use of the images had caused her.
The state’s high court noted Harvard’s acknowledged “complicity in the horrific actions” surrounding the creation of the daguerreotypes, saying that “Harvard’s present obligations cannot be divorced from its past abuses”. In practical terms, the 2022 decision meant Lanier could move forward with limited claims even as Harvard retained legal title to the photos.
Settlement and Transfer
Under the settlement announced, Harvard agreed to relinquish the two daguerreotypes identified by Lanier as depicting Renty and Delia.
The images will be transferred from Harvard’s Peabody Museum to the newly opened International African American Museum (IAAM) in downtown Charleston. The Charleston museum, located near historic slave wharves, is dedicated to the African-American experience and the history of slavery in South Carolina.
Tonya M. Matthews, the IAAM’s chief executive, said Harvard’s decision was a moment “175 years in the making.” In a statement she praised Lanier’s “bravery, tenacity, and grace” in winning the return of these “critical pieces” of Renty and Delia’s story. The museum has also committed to involving Lanier in how the images’ story is interpreted and displayed.
Harvard noted that it had long been eager to move the Zealy Daguerreotypes (as the collection is sometimes called) to an appropriate public institution.
In a statement the university said it had been working “to put them in the appropriate context and increase access to them for all Americans,” and welcomed the settlement as a way to achieve that goal.
The agreement also reportedly includes an undisclosed financial component. However, Harvard has stopped short of formally acknowledging Lanier’s genealogical claim or admitting any wrongdoing. The settlement does not formally recognize Lanier as a descendant of the photo subjects (a fact Harvard said it had not confirmed), and the university has not publicly apologized for its historical role in the matter.
According to Lanier’s attorney Josh Koskoff, Harvard “still hasn’t publicly acknowledged” that connection or its own “complicity in slavery” – something Lanier had specifically demanded in her lawsuit. Nevertheless, by surrendering the images Harvard is, in effect, yielding ownership to allow their story to be told elsewhere.
Reactions and Historical Significance
Lanier herself said it represents a “moment in history” and “a victory for reparations”. Holding a portrait of her great-great-great-grandfather, she declared: “This pilfered property, images taken without dignity or consent and used to promote a racist pseudoscience, will now be repatriated to a home where their stories can be told and their humanity can be restored.”
Susanna Moore, a great-great-great-granddaughter of Louis Agassiz, stood with Lanier and described her own ancestor’s project as “deeply racist.” She agreed with Lanier that the case shows how “the meaning of such objects in museums can and should change,” and that Lanier “knew all along she was not small and she was not alone”.
Lanier’s attorneys called the result unprecedented. “I think it’s one of one in American history,” Koskoff said, noting that never before had someone succeeded in reclaiming such old images of enslaved people.
Koskoff emphasized that the key is giving the descendants control over how these images are used. “It’s not an improvement just to move them from one closet in a mighty institution to another,” he said. “The real importance of this is to allow these images to breathe, to allow the full story to be told – not by a conflicted player in the story, which Harvard was from the beginning”. He added that everyone has a fundamental right to tell their own family’s story, and that in this case the settlement finally lets Lanier do that.
For Harvard, the settlement closes a fraught chapter. University officials said they are grateful for the important conversations sparked by Lanier’s suit, even as they continue to resist labeling her a descendant.
But for Lanier and many advocates, the transfer of the photos to South Carolina – the same state where Renty and Delia were enslaved – is a form of symbolic justice.
The portraits will now be exhibited at the Charleston museum alongside the narrative of their lives, rather than kept in an ivory-tower archive. In that sense, this outcome represents a rare instance of historical redress: centuries after being taken, Renty and Delia’s images will finally be where their family and community have a voice, restoring a measure of dignity and agency that was long denied.
Sources: Associated Press / The Guardian / The Washington Post
