Images of seven enslaved individuals were officially welcomed home March 11 to South Carolina, the place where the historically significant daguerreotypes were originally created in 1850.
The 15 daguerreotypes, believed to be the earliest known photographs of enslaved people in the United States, are now under the stewardship of the International African American Museum (IAAM).
“Renty. Delia. Jack. Drana. Jem. Alfred. Fassena,” said IAAM President and CEO Tonya Matthews in remarks at an event that included the media and who were operative in vouchsafing the transfer of the images from Harvard University.
Among those in attendance was Connecticut resident Tamara Lanier, a descendant of Renty and his daughter Delia. Lanier initiated and persisted for more than two decades to gain possession of the images, by way of the lawsuit Lanier v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.
After initially contacting Harvard in 2017, Lanier sued the institution in 2019. In 2025, a settlement was reached, with Harvard agreeing to transfer all 15 daguerreotypes to IAAM.
“My ancestors now have a new home,” said Lanier, who was joined at the event, by co-counsels Josh Koskoff and Ben Crump, who took the case in spite of the daunting challenge given a formidably long lapse of the statute of limitations.
“My soul is at peace here in the International African American Museum,” said Crump, a civil rights attorney based in Washington, D.C.
The museum characterized the arrival of the images as both a homecoming, with the images returning to their state of origin, as well as a homegoing, referring to the Gullah funeral ceremony for the departed’s return to Africa and the afterlife.
That final resting place comes more than 175 years after the images were created. At the direction of Harvard natural scientist Louis Agassiz, photographer Joseph T. Zealy in Columbia forcibly took images of his subjects disrobed and posed in a manner that stripped them of their dignity.
The goal, Matthews said, was “to gather evidence to prove racist pseudoscientific theories and Black peoples were descended from an inferior branch of the human race.” Since then, they have spent much of that time stored away in the archives of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology.
Now under the stewardship of IAAM, which also assisted in linking Lanier’s genealogical ancestry to both Renty and Delia via its Center for Family History, the daguerreotypes will be reframed as portraits honoring the lives and the humanity of the individuals they depict.
“This is not just about repatriations. It’s also about reparations,” Matthews said, noting that it was historic, not only in what it sought, but what it represents, “a moral reckoning, a landmark reparations lawsuit that dares to command redress for a centuries-old wrong.”
Due to the rarity and fragility of the original daguerreotypes, which are made from silver-plated copper sheets, they will be preserved under strict conservation standards. High-quality reproductions will be used for exhibition and public viewing interpretation.
“When you visit and explore here, you are embraced by two understandings. First is that this story of slavery and enslavement is neither the beginning or the end of the African American journey, it’s in the middle,” said Matthews of the museum’s power of place.
“And second, you will begin to understand the extraordinary ability of African Americans and African American stories to simultaneously hold the sensations of trauma and joy.”
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