BOSTON – A Massachusetts judge dismissed a lawsuit by a Connecticut woman who said Harvard University had illegally owned pictures of her enslaved ancestors and refused to hand them over.
The lawsuit dismissed on Tuesday centers on a series of 1850 photos believed to be among the first images of enslaved people in the United States. The photos show a South Carolina man identified as Renty and his daughter, Delia. Both were placed shirtless and photographed from various angles.
The photos were commissioned by Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz, whose theories about racial difference were used to support slavery in the United States.
In her 2019 lawsuit, Tamara Lanier of Norwich, Connecticut said that Renty and Delia are her ancestors and that the photos were taken against her will. She demanded the Harvard photos, saying that the Ivy League school had explored the portraits for profit, including using the image of Renty on the cover of a book.
Lanier’s lawsuit claimed that Agassiz saw Renty and Delia as “nothing more than research specimens” and forced them to participate in a “degrading exercise designed to prove their own subhuman status”.
The lawsuit says Lanier checked his genealogical ties to Renty, whom she calls “Papa Renty” and claims to be his great-great-grandfather.
But the judge who heard the case supported Harvard, who argued that Lanier had no legal right to the photos. In her decision, Middlesex High Court judge Camille Sarrouf said the photos are owned by the photographer, not the subject.
“Fully recognizing the continuing impact that slavery has had in the United States, the law, as it currently stands, does not confer a property right on the subject of a photograph, regardless of how questionable the origins of the photograph may be,” wrote Sarrouf in decision.
Civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, one of Lanier’s lawyers, said he plans to appeal the case.
“We remain convinced of the correctness of Ms. Lanier’s statement about these images of her slave ancestors and that she will be on the right side of history when this case is finally resolved,” Crump said in a statement. “It is past time for Harvard to atone for its previous ties to slavery and research on white supremacy and to stop profiting from the images of the slaves.”
In a statement, Harvard said it was exploring how to place the photos in “an appropriate home” that “allows them to be more accessible to a wider segment of the public and tells the stories of the enslaved people they portray”.