Harvard 'shamelessly' profits from photos of enslaved people, descendant claims in lawsuit

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A descendant of enslaved people has sued Harvard University, alleging that the Ivy League institution has “shamelessly” profited from photos of her ancestors.

Tamara Lanier, of Norwich, Connecticut, claims that Harvard has ignored requests to surrender images of a man named Renty, whom she says is her great-great-great grandfather, and his daughter Delia.

The images, which date back to the 19th century, show Renty and Delia, of South Carolina, shirtless. They are believed to be among the earliest known photos of enslaved people in America.

Lanier is suing Harvard for “wrongful seizure, possession and expropriation” of the images, asking the university to return the photos to her, pay unspecified damages, and recognise her ancestry.

A Harvard spokesman told the Associated Press that the institution “has not yet been served, and with that is in no position to comment on this complaint”.

The images, also known as daguerreotypes, were taken as part of a study by Louis Agassiz, a Swiss-American Harvard biologist whose work was used to support slavery.

A 1996 paper about Agassiz’s 1850 photos, published in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, a former academic journal and current online publication that reports on race and education in the US, states that Agassiz’s images served two purposes: one “nominally scientific”, and the other “frankly political”.

“They were designed to analyse the the physical differences” between white people and black people, the article states, “but at the same time they were meant to prove the superiority of the white race”.

Agassiz’s images are currently kept at the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnography at Harvard’s Cambridge, Massachusetts campus.

“To Agassiz, Renty and Delia were nothing more than research specimens,” Lanier’s suit states. “The violence of compelling them to participate in a degrading exercise designed to prove their own subhuman status would not have occurred to him, let alone mattered.”

The filing also alleges that “by contesting Ms Lanier’s claim of lineage, Harvard is shamelessly capitalising on the intentional damage done to black Americans’ genealogy by a century’s worth of policies that forcibly separated families, erased slaves’ family names, withheld birth and death records, and criminalized literacy”.

Additional reporting by agencies