Little did they know that 169 years later, they would be at the center of a dispute over who should own the fruits of American slavery.
On Wednesday, Tamara Lanier, 54, filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts saying she is a direct descendant of the pair, who were identified by their first names, Renty and Delia, and that the valuable photographs — commissioned by a professor at Harvard and now stored in a museum on campus — are hers.
The images, Lanier said, are records of her personal family history, not cultural artifacts to be kept by an institution.
“These were our bedtime stories,” Lanier’s older daughter, Shonrael, said.
The case renews focus on the role the country’s oldest universities played in slavery, and also comes amid a growing debate over whether the descendants of the enslaved are entitled to reparations — and what those reparations might look like.
“It is unprecedented in terms of legal theory and reclaiming property that was wrongfully taken,” Benjamin Crump, one of Lanier’s lawyers, said. “Renty’s descendants may be the first descendants of slave ancestors to be able to get their property rights."
The lawsuit says the images are the “spoils of theft,” because as slaves Renty and Delia were unable to give consent. It says the university is illegally profiting from the images by using them for “advertising and commercial purposes,” such as by using Renty’s image on the cover a $40 anthropology book. And it argues that by holding on to the images, Harvard has perpetuated the hallmarks of slavery that prevented African-Americans from holding, conveying or inheriting personal property.
Renty and Delia were among seven slaves who appeared in 15 images made using the daguerreotype process, an early form of photography imprinted on silvered copper plates.
The daguerreotypes were commissioned by Louis Agassiz, a Swiss-born zoologist and Harvard professor.
Agassiz subscribed to polygenesis, the theory that black and white people descended from different origins. The theory, later discredited, was used to promote the racist idea that black people were inferior to whites.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.