In a landmark resolution, Harvard University has agreed to surrender ownership of haunting 1850 photographs depicting an enslaved father and daughter—images taken without consent for a cruel scientific study aimed at proving Black inferiority. The move settles a six-year legal battle led by Tamara Lanier, a direct descendant demanding justice for her great-great-great-grandfather, Renty Taylor, and his daughter Delia.
Rather than returning the photos directly to Lanier, Harvard will transfer them, along with images of five other enslaved individuals, to the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina—ensuring these painful relics are preserved within a context of education and reckoning.
“This is a small but meaningful step toward acknowledging the darkest chapters of American history and beginning to make amends,” Lanier said, underscoring the symbolic weight of the settlement.
Harvard, located in Cambridge, long expressed a desire to entrust the images to a public institution that could offer appropriate historical framing and greater accessibility. The university’s statement praised the agreement as a path forward to honoring that mission.
The photos, originally snapped under duress by Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz for a racist scientific experiment, were housed at Harvard’s Peabody Museum until Lanier’s 2019 lawsuit challenged the university’s claim over the images. Initially dismissed by a lower court, the case was revived in 2022 by Massachusetts’ highest court, which condemned Harvard’s dismissive attitude toward Lanier’s ancestral claims and criticized its use of Renty’s image, including on a book cover.
Justice Scott Kafker’s ruling called the photographs’ origins “horrific” and reminded Harvard of its “responsibilities to the descendants of the individuals coerced into having their half-naked images captured.”
This settlement arrives amid Harvard’s broader struggles with political pressures threatening its funding and international student programs. Yet here, the university takes a step toward confronting a painful legacy that still echoes today—where images born from cruelty are finally entrusted to a place of honor and remembrance.
