From These Roots: My Fight with Harvard to Reclaim My LegacyConnecticut Freedom Trail
Hartford
July 22, 2025
The Connecticut Freedom Trail hosted a fascinating virtual talk Tuesday afternoon with author Tamara Lanier about her book, From These Roots, and her journey to chronicle her family’s history, which ultimately led to a fight with one of the wealthiest and most powerful institutions in the world.
Ms. Lanier’s story begins with a promise to her mother that she will take up the mantle of writing the story of her family’s genealogy after her mother passes away. A chance encounter with a man who by day runs an ice cream shop, but by night is an expert researcher in the field of genealogy, brings a daguerreotype of her great-great-grandfather, Renty Taylor, to her attention.
It turns out that Renty was on a plantation that was visited by Louis Agassiz, a professor and researcher at Harvard University who set out to prove “scientifically” that Africans were inferior to Europeans. As part of his process, he forced enslaved Africans to strip down and have their pictures taken. Renty was one of the Africans who were exploited and abused in this process. The images went back to Harvard with Agassiz.
At first, Ms. Lanier simply asked Harvard to return the images to her family. After being flatly ignored for years, she enlisted the help of famed civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, who called her case “an important reparations case.” She enlisted the aid of the descendants of Agassiz, who wrote a letter to the president of Harvard requesting that they return the images to Lanier’s family. Harvard ignored their request as well, and set out to defend itself against the lawsuit.
After lower courts in Massachusetts dismissed the case, Ms. Lanier took it all the way to the state’s Supreme Court. There the court made two surprising rulings. First, it ruled that Lanier’s case could go forward, making it the first reparations case in American history to move beyond dismissal. Yet they also ruled that Harvard could keep the images. Eventually, as public pressure built on the university, Harvard agreed to transfer the images to a museum of African American history in South Carolina.
There’s so much more texture to Ms. Lanier’s story. It’s a personal tale that you should hear from beginning to end touching on broad themes such as the utter refusal of the United States and the various institutions that benefited from slavery, Jim Crow, redlining and the entire spectrum of discrimination and violence visited upon African Americans to do anything material to make those wrongs right.
Perhaps the most damning aspect of Ms. Lanier’s odyssey is how it reveals the ways that the inhumanity of slavery continues to infect the institutions we live under to this day, by design.
The immorality of slavery was never in question — Thomas Jefferson’s contemporaneous writings make that abundantly clear. Still, everything from the laws which determine the shape of our government to the courts that enforced those laws, down to the personal interactions between enslavers and the enslaved, was designed to perpetuate and protect one of the greatest crimes in human history.
Those institutions still define “justice” as the practice of acknowledging grave wrongs while doing absolutely nothing to remedy them. That’s how an institution like Harvard can say with a straight face that it is trying to reconnect the descendants of the enslaved with its history while waging a legal battle to prevent exactly that. That’s how a court can acknowledge the horrific conditions under which Renty’s daguerreotypes were produced, and still rule that Harvard can keep the images. That’s how the United States Congress can issue a formal apology for slavery but in the same breath say that such a declaration cannot be used as a basis for restitution claims.
It took Tamara Lanier six years and several strokes of luck to get Harvard to give up images of her ancestor which the college itself admitted were obtained under abhorrent circumstances. Then she couldn’t get them herself; they had to be transferred from one institution to another. The reckoning over the legacy of slavery and the continued abuses committed against African Americans seems no closer, despite being nearly 400 years overdue.
