The plaintiff, Tamara Lanier, wanted Harvard to acknowledge its complicity in slavery

Harvard, a beacon of liberal education, has a racist past, and it is finally coming to light. And it goes much deeper than “Good Old Boys” attending a KKK meeting. It is based on scientific racism, including people wearing suits and dresses and supporting the idea of Black inferiority.

Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz, a Swiss naturalist and the head of Harvard University’s Lawrence Scientific School, sought to use images of enslaved Africans to support theories of White racial superiority in 1850 and the belief that Black people were inferior and could be enslaved to support the needs of Whites, the superior race.

The court battle ended Thursday when the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled in favor of Tamara Lanier, who had brought suit against the university for withholding a collection of her relatives’ photographs, depicting enslaved Black people, including Papa Renty, her great-great-great-grandfather, and Delia, his daughter.

Lanier won a 15-year judicial battle in which Harvard University agreed to turn over 15 daguerreotypes, or photographs, thought to be among the earliest images of enslaved people in the United States.

The daguerreotypes, which were taken for Agassiz in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1850, had two purposes, one nominally scientific, the other frankly political. 

On May 23, Lanier’s attorney, Joshua Koskoff, announced that Harvard has agreed to transfer the 175-year-old daguerreotypes—the earliest known images of enslaved people in the U.S.—to the International African American Museum in Charleston, S.C., where Renty and Delia were once enslaved. 

The daguerreotypes, which were taken for Agassiz in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1850, had two purposes, one nominally scientific, the other frankly political. 

In Lanier’s lawsuit, she demanded that Harvard acknowledge its complicity with slavery and pay an unspecified sum in damages. An undisclosed financial settlement was part of the resolution announced Wednesday. 

They were designed to analyze the physical differences between European whites and African blacks, but at the same time, they were meant to prove the superiority of the White race. Agassiz hoped to use the photographs as evidence to prove his theory.

Lanier, a Connecticut resident, first filed a lawsuit in 2019, accusing Harvard of the “wrongful seizure, possession, and expropriation” of the images. She objected to the university’s use of Renty’s photo in promotional materials, including a 2017 academic conference, and claimed Harvard profited from the images by charging high licensing fees.

On Wednesday, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that Lanier had confirmed her genealogical ties to Papa Renty and his daughter Delia, about whom she had heard stories from her mother.

The Associated Press reported that the photos, which were originally taken in 1850, had been held by Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology for years.

The photos were originally commissioned in 1850 by Agassiz, a proponent of scientific racism, who sought to use images of enslaved Africans to support theories of racial hierarchy. 

Renty and Delia were forced to pose shirtless for Agassiz’s research, treated not as people but as objects.

“To Agassiz, Renty and Delia were nothing more than research specimens,” the suit stated, according to the Associated Press. “The violence of compelling them to participate in a degrading exercise designed to prove their subhuman status would not have occurred to him, let alone mattered,” Lanier said.

She also published a book titled “From These Roots,” documenting her fight for justice. 

Agassiz first arrived in Philadelphia, where he saw his first Black man. He wrote to his mother that Blacks and Whites are not the same species.

The Lawrence Scientific School was established at Harvard in 1847 by a gift of $50,000 from industrialist Abbott Lawrence, who wished to support applied science in eastern Massachusetts.

Agassiz was later named head of the school.