A Vision of (In)Justice: Harvard Archives Bear a Strange Fruit
Below is an op-ed I submitted to the Harvard Crimson, which intended to publish it but later walked back that decision. For transparency’s sake, I have published the entirety of my email exchange with their editors here. It should be noted that the newspaper, which is run by students and ostensibly independent from the university administration, refused to run a story about Tamara Lanier in 2016, citing concerns from the Peabody Museum (see page 16 of the recent lawsuit Lanier filed). The newspaper instead ran an op-ed from the then-university president Drew Faust.
At last month’s “Vision & Justice” convening hosted by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, luminaries from Harvard and beyond came together to consider the most pressing problems at the juncture of justice, arts, and race. In particular, the conference description characterized the “foundational right of representation in a democracy” as “the right to be recognized justly.”
So it was peculiar that neither the event nor the subsequent publication referenced the ongoing struggle of Tamara Lanier to retrieve daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors, Renty and Delia, currently held by Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology. A black woman’s battle against Harvard for family photographs somehow did not take center stage at Sanders Theatre during a conference about images that also featured numerous speakers and scholars who built careers studying slavery and its afterlives.
The absence is less surprising given Harvard’s history on the matter. Rather than afford Lanier and her family ‘just recognition’ of the lineage linking them to the enslaved people in the images, Harvard has instead spent years refuting Lanier’s ancestral claims. Pamela Gerardi, the Peabody’s Director of External Relations, publicly denied Lanier’s heritage in 2014 telling reporters, “She’s given us nothing that directly connects her ancestor to the person in our photograph.”
Gerardi’s statement is particularly pernicious on two counts. First, the system of chattel slavery specifically sought to sever family ties and histories among the enslaved. Thus, to require black people produce a precise lineage reinforces the racist intent of the institution. Second, Harvard even refuses to acknowledge the documentary evidence the Lanier family was able to collect and complement through a rich tradition of oral history and an assortment of family artifacts.
Seemingly no amount of evidence can convince the university of Lanier’s familial claims. Hence, Harvard clings to its denial of the Lanier family history because it cannot controvert the most insidious ingredient of the daguerreotypes’ past, which is that a virulent white supremacist and scientist by the name of Louis Agassiz commissioned them in order to lend scientific credence to his white supremacist theories about society.
Agassiz was born in Switzerland and would eventually move to Paris where he was trained in zoology under the direct tutelage of Georges Cuvier, a fact praised on at least two different Harvard websites. Not mentioned on either page, however, is that Cuvier earned esteem in Europe as the scientist who dissected the body of Saartije Baartman following her death in 1815, spurred no doubt from the years that scientists, including Cuvier, publicly exhibited and exoticized her body with the hope of finding the missing link between humans and other animals. Cuvier created a plastic cast of Baartman’s warm dead body before cutting out her brains and genitalia, which along with her skeleton were displayed in two prominent French museums until 1974. But Cuvier did not stop there. In 1817, he published a widely read report about Baartman’s body in which he wrote that “All these characters, in an almost unnoticeable fashion, resemble one another in Negro women, and female Bushwomen and monkeys” and that he “had never seen a human head more similar to those of monkeys.”
With Cuvier as his mentor, it should be no shock that once Louis Agassiz received one of the first Harvard professorships of science in 1847 he immediately sought to advance a theory, polygenism, that argued humans were descended from multiple ancestors as opposed to a single common one. There was no more famous and revered champion of polygenism than Louis Agassiz. Whereas his mentor Cuvier relied on the dead body of a black woman to advance his assertions, Agassiz focused his attention on living bodies and used the emergent visual technology of the day, the daguerreotype, to showcase his white supremacy.
This focus drew Agassiz’s attention to the South Carolina plantation on which Renty and Delia were enslaved in 1850 when the daguerreotypes of them were taken without their consent, which enslaved people were legally unable to give. Although a local photographer, Joseph T. Zealy, snapped the infamous images, the abundant published scholarship on the matter — here, here, and here, for example — is overwhelmingly conclusive that he did so at the behest of Agassiz. Agassiz’s white supremacist pseudoscience was widely known and applauded by enslavers at the time, his name making mention in former Harvard President Drew Faust’s first book that examines the influence of intellectuals in the slave South.
Even after Charles Darwin’s 1859 publication On the Origin of the Species that publicly and permanently debunked the polygenism theory, Louis Agassiz remained committed to collecting evidence in support of white supremacy. This commitment best explains why, in the shadows of the U.S. Civil War, Agassiz and his wife Elizabeth (herself a founder of Radcliffe College) traveled in 1865 to Brazil where slavery was still legal. In the account of their trip published in 1869, the Agassiz couple concluded:
Like long-armed monkeys the Negroes are generally slender, with long legs, long arms, and a comparatively short body, while the Indians are short-legged, short-armed, and long-bodied, the trunk being also rather heavy in build.
A full fifty years after his teacher Georges Cuvier made similar statements about the dead and dissected body of Saartije Baartman, Agassiz followed in his famous French tutor’s footsteps to argue explicitly white supremacist views that, less than five years prior, ripped a nation apart and left more than half a million people dead. Agassiz’s steadfast defense of scientific racism, then, was not a snapshot in time. Instead, he started, sustained, and concluded his academic career as a preeminent professor of white supremacy.
While Harvard challenges the lineage of Tamara Lanier, it should scrutinize the lineage of its former star professor whose ‘scientific’ expeditions helped engender the exploitation of untold numbers of people across the globe. Harvard President Lawrence Bacow recently spoke to the Harvard Crimson about the Lanier lawsuit and remarked, “I think we have the law on our side.” The courts will ultimately decide that question. Already evident, however, is that history is not on Harvard’s side. For the past 169 years, Renty and Delia have been held captive in the cloaked cover of the Peabody’s archives. Each passing day presents Harvard a chance to right this wrong and recognize that the just thing to do is staring all of us in the face, if only we would dare to see it.
