Boston (AP)-Charvard University will abandon the 175-year-old photographs, which are thought to be the earliest taken to enslaved people in a South Carolina Museum dedicated to the history of African-American as part of a settlement with one of the descendants of the subjects.
The photos of the objects identified by Tamara Lanie such as her great-great-great-grand-ghost reti, whom she calls “Dad Renty”, and his daughter Delia will be transferred from the Archeology Museum and the ethnology of Piibodi in the International African-American Museum in South Carolina A lawyer where lawyers were made.
The settlement marks the end of a 15-year battle between Lanie and the most elite university in the nation to release the 19th-century Dagoreotypes, a precursor to contemporary photos. Lanny’s lawyer Joshua Koscof told the Associated Press that the resolution was an “unprecedented” victory for descendants of the enslaved US and praised his client’s annual determination to pursue justice for her ancestors.
“I think this is one of the story in American history because of the combination of incredible features: there is a case that dates back to 175 years to win control over images dating from this long enslaved people – this has never happened before,” Koscof said in a telephone interview.
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Complicated story
Lanie, who lives in Connecticut, filed a lawsuit against the Ivy League institution in 2019 for the “unlawful seizure, possession and alienation” of the images of Renty, Delia and five other enslaved individuals. The claim attacked Harvard because of the “operation” of the Renty image at a conference in 2017 and in other applications. It says Harvard took advantage of the photos by asking for a “huge” licensing fee to reproduce the images.
Dagereotypes were commissioned by Harvard biologist Louis Agasis, whose theories of racial difference were used to support slavery in the United States, which says Agasiz encountered Renty and Delia as he traveled plantations in search of racially “pure” slaves in Africa.
To create the images, both Renty and Delia were placed without a shirt and shot by several corners.
“For Agassiz, Renta and Delia, they were nothing more than a research specimens,” the costume said. “Violence to force them to participate in a humiliating exercise designed to prove that their own Subhuman status would not have occurred to him, let alone matter.”
In 2022, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts ruled in favor of Lanny and upheld the merits of Lanny’s trial against Harvard after a judge has ruled that there was no legal claim for the images.
The highest judgment of the state acknowledged “Harvard’s complicity in the terrifying actions surrounding the creation of the Dagonotypes”, saying that “Harvard’s current obligations cannot be divorced from his past abuses.”
New Home for Renty and Delia
In a statement on Wednesday, the Executive Director of the International African -American Museum Dr. Tonya M. Matthew called Harvard’s retreat from the images “175 years in the creation”.
“The courage, perseverance and grace shown by Da Lannie through the long and difficult process of returning these critical pieces from Renty and the history of Delia in South Carolina is a model for all of us,” she said.
The South Carolina Museum is committed to working with Lanie and including in solutions on how the history of the images will be told.
“It is not only an improvement to move them from one closet to a mighty institution to another. And so, the real meaning of this is to allow these images to breathe in order to allow history – the full story – to be told not by a conflict player in the story that Harvard was from the beginning,” said Koscof.
The lawyer said “everyone has the right to tell the story of their own families.”
“This is the least, the most substantive right we can have,” he said. “To be able to tell the story of her family with a museum that will allow her to say it – I want to say that you can’t do better than that.”
In Lanny’s court case, she asked Harvard to acknowledge her complicity in slavery, to listen to Lanny’s oral family history, and to pay an indefinite amount in damage. An undisclosed financial agreement was part of the Harvard resolution announced on Wednesday, but Koscof said Harvard had not yet publicly acknowledged Lanny’s relationship with them or his relationship with the immortalization of slavery in the United States, Koscof said.
“This is just left unanswered by Harvard,” he said.
He said that Lanius does not expect or did not wait to hear from the institution, but that the agreement speaks for himself.
“In the end, the truth will find you – you can hide from it so long from it,” he said. “Yes, the story is written by the winners. But over time, you know, these winners sometimes look like loser.”