After six long years, the Harvard-Renty controversy came to a close last week when 15 daguerreotypes of Renty Taylor, his daughter Delia and five other enslaved people were transferred to the International African American Museum in South Carolina. The court case – Lanier vs. President & Fellows of Harvard College – had Renty’s great-great-great granddaughter, Tamara Lanier, suing Harvard for possession of the 176-year-old depictions, which were commissioned by Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz in 1850 as evidence for his racist polygenic theory that whites were intellectually superior to Blacks. Its conclusion in May came after many turns and twists. (Harvard has said it cannot confirm that Lanier is related to Renty.)
What stands out is that just after Lanier initiated the case in 2019, Harvard launched the Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery. That committee’s 2022 report showed that Harvard had enslaved 70 or more people and benefited fiancially and otherwise from their enslavement. It prompted Harvard to create a $100 million initiative to support descendant communities and educational initiatives tied to that legacy.
Yet it was during that time that Harvard fought Lanier’s claim, citing she lacked property rights – seeming antithetical to a mission to document and atone. To observers the question became: Was Harvard operating out of different ideological silos, or simply talking out of both sides of its mouth?
In a communication from spokesperson Jason Newton, director of media relations and communications, the university said, “Harvard University has long been eager to place the [Joseph T.] Zealy Daguerreotypes with another museum or other public institution to put them in the appropriate context and increase access to them for all Americans. Following the resolution of the lawsuit last year, Harvard worked closely with the International African American Museum for their transfer, which took place in early December. Since the transfer, Harvard has eagerly supported the IAAM’s work on an exhibition of the daguerreotypes, as well as other future opportunities to honor their legacies and humanity in ways that contribute to the deeper perspective and understanding of our nation’s history.” The exhibition is expected in October.
As for Lanier’s suit, in 2020 a Massachusetts Superior Court judge dismissed the case, ruling that she had no legal claim to the photographs. Lanier appealed, and in 2022 – around the time the committee’s report was released – the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court issued a decision to reinstate the part of the suit regarding damages for emotional distress. It upheld the dismissal of the ownership claim.
Under property law, Harvard had clear rights to the images; a Harvard faculty member commissioned them as part of a study. That it was a racist study designed to separate and subjugate was beside the point – but this is where the law ignores morality, and where the university should have chosen a different path. Renty, Delia and the others were forced to pose for Zealy’s photo session in Columbia, South Carolina, for which they were stripped of their clothing (Delia was clad below the waist). Part of the damage documented in the suit was Agassiz and the school framing Renty and Delia as specimens and not human beings.
In her 2025 memoir, “From These Roots: My Fight With Harvard to Reclaim My Legacy,” Lanier details how Harvard ignored her inquiries when she made contact in 2019 after learning of her blood ties to Renty and Delia.
The daguerreotypes had been essentially lost in Harvard’s archives after Agassiz’s death in 1873. They were unearthed in the archives of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology’s in 1976.
Agassiz’s name was expunged in 2002 from the Agassiz Elementary School on Oxford Street; it was renamed for Maria L. Baldwin, the pioneering Cantabrigian who in 1889 became the first Black woman principal in the Northeast – at the Agassiz. The surrounding “Agassiz Neighborhood” was renamed to honor Baldwin in 2021. The building in Harvard’s Radcliffe Yard bearing the Agassiz name is named after Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz, his wife and the first president of Radcliffe College. A street in Avon Hill and a mountain in his native Switzerland still bear his name.
With the court case resolved and the images in good stewardship, what lingers is the seeming lack of compassion Harvard showed in its treatment of Lanier and Renty and Delia’s legacy. Maybe in the aftermath, Lanier and kin can find some sense of solace. Lanier wanted the images at the IIAM, which has a mission to document the African American experience by tracing stories of the journey from Africa through slavery, emancipation, Civil Rights and into the present.
Her perseverance is inspirational, and likely to become the template for similar reparations litigation – perhaps next for indigenous people whose ancestors’ remains are still on display behind glass.
Tom Meek is a writer living in Cambridge whose reviews, essays, short stories and articles have appeared in The Boston Phoenix, The Boston Globe, The Rumpus, The Charleston City Paper and SLAB literary journal. He’s a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics and teaches writing and journalism at Grub Street and the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.