Harvard University has released ownership of what scholars consider the earliest surviving photographs of enslaved African Americans, settling an eight-year dispute with a lone descendant of the subjects captured in the images.
Under a confidential settlement announced on Wednesday, the Cambridge, Massachusetts school said it will transfer fifteen daguerreotypes dated around 1850, long kept in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, to the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina,
The Charleston museum plans to display the early copper-plate produced images in cooperation with Tamara Lanier, the woman behind the legal dispute. In legal filings, Lanier has claimed the images depict her great-great-great-grandfather, Renty, and his daughter, Delia and that independent research confirms her genealogical links to them.
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The dispute began in 2019 when Lanier sued Harvard, arguing the university had no legal claim to images she describes as “dehumanizing” and taken without consent on commission for the Swiss-born biologist Louis Agassiz, a former Harvard professor. (Harvard denied Lanier’s initial request to have the photographs returned in 2017.)
Agassiz, now widely discredited, was a proponent of controversial theories around White superiority that once underpinned justifications for a slavery system in the U.S.
In 2022, Lanier hit a stalemate when a Massachusetts courts ruled that ownership of the objects remains with the photographer, not the subjects, but allowed Lanier to pursue damages based on “emotional distress” related to Harvard’s continued use of the images in marketing materials. She was granted the chance to pursue the claim further in a separate ruling in 2023.
In a press conference, Lanier’s attorneys called the restitution a “singular victory for descendants of the enslaved,” arguing that the return comes at a critical time for Harvard and calls for equity, as the university faces targeting by the Trump administration and a $2.2 billion funding freeze related to its handling of Palestinian solidarity campaigns on campus. (Lanier was joined by a descendant of Agassiz, who has supported the efforts to return them.)
Harvard said in statements around the settlement that it has for years been searching for options to place the daguerreotypes in a more appropriate and public setting. Their placement in a Southern museum now marks a period of newly opened access to the works. Financial terms of the settlement were not disclosed.