University settles with Tamara Lanier, who says she is descendent of people featured in 175-year-old images

Harvard University has agreed to transfer possession of 19th-century photographs of an enslaved man and his daughter to the International African American Museum in South Carolina as part of a settlement with a woman who says she is a descendant of the enslaved individuals.

Tamara Lanier, who lives in Norwich, Connecticut, who says she is the great-great-great granddaughter of Renty Taylor and his daughter, Delia Taylor – two of the enslaved people featured in the daguerreotypes taken in 1850 that Harvard owned – sued the university in 2019 over “wrongful seizure, possession and expropriation” of the images, which she says were taken without her ancestors’ consent.