A Harvard professor used the photos of two enslaved African Americans to support his racist beliefs, and the descendant of those two people was allowed to sue the university for emotional distress, according to the highest court in Massachusetts.
According to the Boston Globe, the state’s Supreme Judicial Court described the Ivy League school’s behavior as “extreme and obscene” when it rejected Tamar Lanier’s allegation that the public display of her forebears caused emotional harm to her.
For ownership of the daguerreotype pictures of her great-great-great-grandfather, Renty Taylor, and his daughter, Delia, Lanier had sued the institution in 2019.
Lanier might file a lawsuit for negligent infliction of mental distress, the court decided, even if Harvard was given ownership of the photographs.
Lanier vowed to fight for her family’s justice in a joint statement with her attorneys, Ben Crump and Josh Koskoff.
We applaud the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s historic decision in Tamara Lanier’s lawsuit against Harvard University for the heinous treatment of her Black ancestors, since it will allow Ms. Lanier to speak out in court in support of Renty’s memory.
As we seek to undo the harm and degradation that Harvard has done to Tamara Lanier, her ancestors, and all other people of color exploited by their institution, we continue this legal and moral war for justice against them with great pride.
Despite the fact that the university has the rights to the photos, the state Supreme Court criticized Harvard for how it handled Lanier’s complaint.
Given the university’s horrifying, historical involvement in the coerced production of the degrading daguerreotypes, Justice Scott Kafker wrote, “Harvard had a duty to respond to Lanier’s requests with due care once she approached Harvard as a descendant of the individuals depicted in these daguerreotypes, provided documentation to that effect, and requested further information.”
Harvard was responsible for the plaintiff’s misery legally and factually, and it should have known that its actions against the plaintiff would certainly create emotional distress.
In light of the Ivy League school’s own admission that it had ties to slavery and held objects that were taken from African Americans in slavery, Chief Justice Kimberly Budd also denounced the school’s activities.
Harvard’s rejection of Lanier’s desire to own the daguerreotypes of Renty and Delia, according to Budd, “flies in the face of its aspirational report.”
Without Lanier’s input or involvement, it “brushed her off,” “publicly disregarded her ancestral claim,” and “continued to show and profit from the daguerreotypes.”
A collection of daguerreotypes, an early kind of photography, made in 1850 of the two South Carolina slaves are shown in the case’s center.
Both were posed shirtless and captured in various positions. The pictures are thought to be the earliest known photographs of slaves in America.
They were commissioned by Louis Agassiz, a Harvard professor whose beliefs on racial difference were used to legitimize slavery in the United States by asserting that African Americans had inferior biological makeup.
According to the lawsuit, Agassiz was searching plantations for racial “pure” slaves born in Africa when he came upon the Congolese Renty and his daughter, Delia.
According to the lawsuit, “Renty and Delia were nothing more to Agassiz than research specimens.” He would not have considered it, much less cared, to force them to take part in a humiliating activity meant to demonstrate their own inferiority.
The lawsuit calls on Harvard, among other things, to admit guilt for the treatment of Renty and Delia and that it “was complicit in perpetuating and defending the institution of slavery.”
The images were uncovered in storage in 1976 by a researcher at a Harvard museum.
However, Lanier’s argument contends that Agassiz never had the right to give the photographs to Harvard because he lacked the subjects’ consent and provided them with no payment.
Lanier claims that her mother used to tell her tales about Renty as a child. According to the lawsuit, Renty trained himself to read as a slave in Columbia, South Carolina, and later held covert Bible readings on the plantation.
He was “little in stature but towering in the imaginations of all who knew him,” according to the author.
According to the lawsuit, Lanier has established her ancestry with Renty, whom she refers to as “Papa Renty,” He is her great-great-great-grandfather, according to her.
According to Lanier, “my mother made sure that not only her children and grandkids, but everyone, understood the stories.”
Lanier responded that she would want the chance to share “the genuine narrative of who Renty was” when asked what she would do if given the images.