After a fifteen-year legal dispute, Harvard University has given up ownership of 175-year-old daguerreotypes, considered the oldest known photographs of enslaved people in the United States, to the International African American Museum in South Carolina. The photographs show Renty Taylor, an enslaved man, and his daughter Delia. They were taken in 1850 at the request of Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz as part of a deeply racist study meant to support the false and pseudoscientific idea of polygenism, which wrongly argued that people of African descent were inferior.
This settlement is a major win for Tamara Lanier, a great-great-great-granddaughter of Renty and Delia, who started the legal fight in 2019. According to AP News, the photographs, taken by Joseph T. Zealy, were not simple portraits. They were part of a cruel and dehumanizing process. Renty and Delia, along with other enslaved individuals, were forced to pose naked and were photographed from different angles, their bodies treated as nothing more than objects for Agassiz’s research.
