By Nate Raymond
BOSTON (Reuters) -Harvard University has agreed to give up ownership of photos of an enslaved father and his daughter who were forced to be photographed in 1850 for a racist study by a professor trying to prove the inferiority of Black people to resolve a lawsuit by one of their descendants.
The settlement was announced on Wednesday by the legal team representing Tamara Lanier, who had waged a six-year legal battle over what she alleged was its wrongful claim of ownership over photos that were taken without her ancestors’ consent.
The two photos will not go to Lanier as part of the settlement, but instead will be turned over along with pictures of five other enslaved people to the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina.
The settlement was first reported by the New York Times and confirmed by a spokesperson for Lanier’s legal team. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The settlement comes at a sensitive moment for Harvard, as the university fights in court against efforts by Republican President Donald Trump’s administration to terminate billions of dollars in grant funding and end its ability to enroll foreign students.
The lawsuit concerned images that depict Renty Taylor and his daughter Delia, slaves on a South Carolina plantation who were forced to disrobe for photos taken for a racist study by Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz.
The photos were being kept at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology on Harvard’s campus when Lanier, a descendant of Taylor, sued in 2019.
A state court judge in Massachusetts initially dismissed the case. But the state’s highest court revived it in 2022, saying she had plausibly alleged that Harvard was negligent and had recklessly caused her to suffer emotional distress.
Justice Scott Kafker, writing for the court at the time, said Harvard had “cavalierly” dismissed Lanier’s claims of an ancestral link and disregarded her requests for information about how it was using the images, including when the school used Renty Taylor’s image on a book cover.
He said Harvard’s complicity in the “horrific” creation of the pictures meant it had “responsibilities to the descendants of the individuals coerced into having their half-naked images captured in the daguerreotypes.”
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Daniel Wallis)
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