Harvard’s slavery committee report logic extends to Agassiz’s photographed subjects.

Evidence

Lanier’s ancestors did not labor on Harvard’s campus or suffer from enslavement directly by Harvard staff, but it is without question—as detailed in the Harvard report, and described by the court, that Harvard, through its agent Agassiz, exploited Renty’s and Delia’s (and others’) enslaved condition to extract from them value then used in furtherance of a white supremacist agenda. Thus, the spirit of the report would appear to encompass dialogue and relationship building with the descendants of those pictured in the Zealy daguerreotypes, as well as pursuit of a visible and lasting remedy to the harm worked by Agassiz and Harvard against them. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 1316

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Harvard exploited enslaved subjects through agent Agassiz for white supremacist purposes (similarity 0.92)
• Agassiz commissioned Zealy’s nude photographs of enslaved people for Harvard. (similarity 0.85)
• Lanier sued Harvard for wrongful seizure and expropriation of her enslaved ancestors’ cultural property (similarity 0.84)
• Harvard’s book mentions photographer Zealy more than the enslaved subjects (similarity 0.84)
• Lanier’s 2011 letter to Faust framed the daguerreotypes as evidence of slavery’s evils. (similarity 0.84)
• Harvard controlled the daguerreotypes’ narrative and dismissed Lanier’s kinship claims (similarity 0.84)
• Harvard sanitized the history of the Zealy daguerreotypes and profited from them (similarity 0.84)
• Harvard asserted ownership of the daguerreotypes without ever stating its basis. (similarity 0.84)
• Harvard spent decades exploiting and sanitizing the daguerreotypes’ history after 1976 (similarity 0.83)
• Harvard excluded the daguerreotypes from its slavery-acknowledgment report (similarity 0.83)
• Harvard framed Lanier’s case as resting on enslaved persons owning their own images (similarity 0.83)
• Harvard’s support of Agassiz made it complicit in racial subhuman propaganda. (similarity 0.83)
• Lanier’s initial approach to Harvard requested only information and verification of her ancestry (similarity 0.83)
• Harvard commissioned expert narratives about enslaved subjects while ignoring living descendants (similarity 0.83)
• Harvard concealed and profited from slave photographs for decades after 1976 discovery (similarity 0.83)