BOSTON (AP) — Harvard University will relinquish 175-year-old photographs believed to be the earliest taken of enslaved people to a South Carolina museum devoted to African American history as part of a settlement with one of the subjects’ descendants.
The photos of the subjects identified by Tamara Lanier as her great-great-great-grandfather Renty, whom she calls “Papa Renty,” and his daughter Delia will be transferred from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology to the International African American Museum in South Carolina, the state where they were enslaved in 1850 when the photos were taken, a lawyer for Lanier said Wednesday.
The settlement marks the end of a 15-year battle between Lanier and the nation’s most elite university to release the 19th-century “daguerreotypes,” a precursor to modern-day photographs. Lanier’s attorney Joshua Koskoff told The Associated Press that the resolution is an “unprecedented” victory for descendants of those enslaved in the U.S. and praised his client’s yearslong determination in pursuing justice for her ancestors.
TBH, I usually look at these stories of reclaiming art objects and shrug my shoulders, but the history of these photographs and what they represent is so incredibly horrendous, I’m a little happy that these people’s story finally gets to be told from a museum that won’t gloss over the eugenics and abuses of slavery as Harvard surely did.