Universities holding African American artifacts must shift from a focus on property to one of repair

Photographs of Renty, Delia, Jack, Jem, Drana, Alfred, and Fassena, a community of Africans enslaved in South Carolina, will finally be released from Harvard University.

This collection of 12 items dating back to 1850 shows a father, Jack, and his daughter, Drana, stripped naked to the waist and photographed by daguerreotypist Joseph T. Zealy, at the behest of Harvard geologist Louis Agassiz.

Once held by Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, this image collection will now move on to the International African American Museum in South Carolina for increased public engagement.

The transfer is part of the settlement of a lawsuit between Harvard and Tamara Lanier, a descendant of the subjects of the photos, whose fight to reclaim the images of her ancestors made it all the way to the Massachusetts Supreme Court.

The Lanier case is hardly the first time the university went to court to defend its property claim over the daguerreotypes.

Harvard threatened to sue contemporary artist Carrie Mae Weems, who included the images in a photographic installation called From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995-1996). After Weems reproduced altered versions of the original photographs in a new work, the university moved from threat of suit to demanding she make payments upon the sale of her work before finally purchasing Weems’ 33-image photo series for its own collection.

This backstory to Harvard’s relationship to the images baffles students every time I teach this information.

Together, we wonder less about why Harvard would not release the items to a family member, but why Harvard would want to maintain possession of these materials after much bad press and increasing public outcry.

By turning to legal intervention, universities treat such artifacts as intellectual property and thereby miss important opportunities to rectify atrocities related to African Americans.

Deliberations about the return of historical artifacts to their original country, or repatriation, have sent Benin bronzes back to Nigeria and sparked outcry about the collections of the British Museum. In another case, African American bodily remains were recently returned to the U.S. from Germany.

Oddly, however, Harvard has continued to wage its fight over Renty’s likeness for more than a decade, despite its statement on repatriation.

Likewise, the remains of MOVE members that were held for years at the University of Pennsylvania are still embroiled in a repair process.

For sure, this delay is likely compelled by both ethical and financial questions. Artifacts are also assets with monetary value that might make them compelling attributes of university portfolios.

In the marketplace, images of enslaved African Americans still hold firm. Even with numerous copies in circulation, images of Peter Gordon’s scourged back list at a high price, selling most recently for $175,000 in 2023. We may never know the monetary value associated with the 12 images of Renty’s community.

As museums around the world contend with the histories of conquest that have built their collections, U.S. universities must think critically about African American archival materials and concepts of repatriation.

To whom must these items be returned? Labels on the photographs taken by Zealy provide a sense of place for the people in the images. Jack, the labels indicate, was born in Guinea, and Drana was “country born,” or native to the U.S., before their enslavement on the Columbia, S.C., “plantation of B.F. Taylor Esq.”

The reclamation of their images by Lanier is an invitation for us to consider what repatriation is for African Americans.

Jasmine Nichole Cobb is a visual and cultural historian. She is a professor of art history and African American studies at Duke University.