By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent
Harvard University will relinquish ownership of the earliest known photographs of enslaved people as part of a historic legal settlement announced Wednesday by nationally renowned civil rights attorney Ben Crump. The agreement resolves a 2019 lawsuit filed by Tamara Lanier, the great-great-great-granddaughter of an enslaved man known as “Papa Renty,” whose image, along with that of his daughter Delia and five others, was captured in 1850 to support racist scientific theories promoted by a Harvard professor. The 19th-century daguerreotypes, long held by Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, were commissioned by Swiss-born biologist Louis Agassiz, a Harvard professor who used the images in a campaign to promote polygenism—the debunked and deeply racist theory that different races have separate origins and that Africans and African Americans are inferior to whites. The photographs were taken in South Carolina, where Renty and Delia were stripped and posed under duress. Read more at www.blackpressusa.com.
