A Racist Harvard Scientist Commissioned Photos of Enslaved People. One Possible Descendant Wants to Reclaim Their Story.



Photography was a fairly new technology back in 1850 when a group of white men 1,000 miles away from Cambridge, Massachusetts, conspired with a famous Harvard professor to use it. Louis Agassiz, a pioneer of natural science, had traveled to South Carolina hoping to prove that different races did not share a common origin, a theory called polygenesis.

To aid his effort, the men had selected seven Black people, most from nearby plantations, and hauled them to a posh photo studio in downtown Columbia. Someone forced the seven to partly or fully undress before a camera. A photographer then captured them from the front, side and back like the specimens Agassiz considered them to be.

Now, 173 years later, Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology holds within its vast collection the resulting 15 images, a kind of early photograph called daguerreotypes. They are among the oldest known photographs of enslaved people in America.


“Harvard has ruled over them with an iron fist,” Lanier said. “But this ugly history will always be in the way of anything they try to do with these images.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/h...-tamara-lanier