Harvard: Descendant can sue over 'horrific' slave photos
A court in the US State of Connecticut ruled a woman can sue the Ivy League university for emotional distress over photos she says depict her enslaved ancestors. They were photographed in 1850 for a racist study.
24.06.2022
A woman in the United States who says she's descended from slaves portrayed in widely-published, historical photos owned by Harvard can sue the university for emotional distress, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled on Thursday.
Tamara Lanier says she is the great-great-great-granddaughter of Renty Taylor, who along with his daughter Delia was forced to be photographed for an 1850 study by a professor trying to prove the inferiority of Black people.
Lanier demanded the photos and unspecified damages from Harvard, saying the school had exploited the daguerreotype for profit.
Thursday's ruling overturns a lower court judgment that dismissed Lanier's 2019 complaint.
Supreme Judicial Court Justice Scott Kafker wrote that Harvard had "cavalierly" dismissed Lanier's claims of an ancestral link and disregarded her requests for information about how it was using the images, including when the school used Renty's image on a book cover.
More:
https://www.dw.com/en/harvard-descendant-can-sue-over-horrific-slave-photos/a-62240953
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Court rules purported descendant of enslaved man can sue Harvard
By Gillian Brockell
June 23, 2022 at 6:05 p.m. EDT
Tamara Lanier holds an 1850 photograph of a South Carolina enslaved person named Renty, who Lanier said is her family's patriarch, on July 17, 2018, at her home in Norwich, Conn. (John Shishmanian/AP)
A woman who says she’s descended from enslaved people photographed for a racist Harvard scientist can sue the school for emotional distress after it “cavalierly” disregarded her requests for information and acknowledgment, Massachusetts’s highest court ruled Thursday.
But the court denied the woman’s request to gain title to the images, believed to be the first taken of enslaved people.
Tamara Lanier, a retired probation officer from Norwich, Conn., says she is the great-great-great-granddaughter of Renty Taylor, the enslaved man photographed nude alongside his daughter. The photos were taken in 1850 at the behest of Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz, who was a proponent of “polygenism,” a pseudoscientific theory that African-descended people had no common ancestors with other peoples and were thus inferior. They have been in Harvard’s possession ever since.
“We are gratified by the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s historic ruling in Tamara Lanier’s case against Harvard University for the horrible exploitation of her Black ancestors, as this ruling will give Ms. Lanier her day in court to advocate for the memory of Renty,” Lanier’s attorneys, Ben Crump and Josh Koskoff, said in a statement.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/06/23/tamara-lanier-renty-harvard-decision/
= new reply since forum marked as read
throughout, Massachusett's "high court" and conversely the "Massachusetts Supreme Court" overruled a lower court... 
