This week, Harvard University agreed to relinquish 15 daguerreotypes thought to be among the earliest photographs of enslaved people in the United States as part of a landmark settlement with Tamara Lanier, who sued the school in 2019. Lanier had confirmed her genealogical ties to Papa Renty, whom she grew up hearing stories about from her mother, and his daughter Delia. They were both enslaved in South Carolina in the 1850s and are depicted on some of the photos commissioned by Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz, a proponent of the pseudoscientific theory of polygenism, for his “experiments” in support of White racial superiority. Lanier wanted the photographs. But above all, she wanted justice.What ensued from her lawsuit six years ago was much more than just a legal struggle for ownership of daguerreotypes that had been sitting in the attic of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology until a former staffer came upon them in the mid-1970s. Lanier’s story soared to national prominence, sparking multilayered and difficult conversations about reparations for Black Americans, the dubious ethics of early photography, and the responsibility of institutions built on the backs of enslaved people.The recent settlement saw the conclusion of this fight and the beginning of a new chapter for the daguerreotypes, which are expected to find a new home at the International African American Museum in South Carolina, where Lanier says they could be better contextualized and connected to their roots.Hyperallergic has followed Lanier’s quest from the start, publishing a special issue on the movement to #FreeRenty in 2021 and a podcast in 2022, and co-hosting a talk this year with ICA LA on the occasion of the release of her memoir, From These Roots. Yesterday, I spoke with Lanier a few hours after a press conference during which the agreement was announced. Our conversation, below, has been edited for length and clarity.Hyperallergic: I wanted to ask you, before anything else, how you are feeling at this moment — in the wake of a historic settlement that will see Harvard relinquish the daguerreotypes after doing everything in its power to hold onto them?Tamara Lanier: When I reflect on 15 years of struggle with Harvard — 15 years of trying to get them to personally acknowledge my legacy, my lineage, and my relationship to Papa Renty, with no success; the battles in the courtroom and the delays; the slow progress; the statements that Harvard has made to the press about me …. It’s been a lot. And to stand here now or to be in this moment where I’m no longer having to fight to defend my ancestors, my legacy, my heritage, after 15 years of just … abuse — it’s like, you’ve been fighting for so long and suddenly you don’t have to fight anymore. And it’s hard to conceptualize what that means moving forward. It’s surreal. But I’m excited about the prospects moving forward. While I am not sure how I feel, the one thing that I know is that there is an excitement about working with a museum that honors and respects the lineage, the heritage, and the legacy of my enslaved ancestors. And it’s not just Renty and Delia. It’s all 15 of the daguerreotypes that are going to be leaving Harvard, going to a new home. I’m extremely excited about that and about working with the [International] African American Museum in South Carolina. I like to think of it as a homegoing ceremony. They’re returning home, returning to their state of origin or where this all began, where they laid their roots. So I’m excited about telling a new story and creating a new narrative, and shedding light not only on the history that was untold, but on how we celebrate them. I’m overwhelmed with so many emotions. But excitement, yeah.H: What is the current status of a possible transfer of the photographs to the International African American Museum? TL: My attorneys have been talking with them, and what I can say is that they are over the moon about the prospect of working with us to tell the story of Renty, Delia, Jack, Drana, Jem, and the others. That is what I can say with absolute certainty — that they have been in communications and they are excited about the prospects.H: I want to bring up something you said in a podcast with our Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian in 2022 that was very moving to me. You were emphasizing the importance of oral histories, and you said: “It was as if I had a roadmap to trace me from where I am here presently to Papa Renty.”TL: Gifted to me by my mother, yes. This is so important because I think what gets lost is the value of oral history, starting with slave narratives and oral histories of the past and how they have been passed down from generation to generation. I firmly believe, and I wrote about this in my book, that the elders didn’t trust the history books to tell our stories. So what they did is embed our history, our legacy, our journey in the hearts and in the minds of the young, telling them to always remember, never forget. My family is not unique in this. I know that there are so many families that have sat around dinner tables and shared stories about who we and whose we are, meaning whom we descend from. I write about this as a gift, when an elder says to you: “This is your legacy. Always remember, never forget.” And to be honest, what is written about us in history books is not necessarily who we are, but more so who the people in positions of authority and influence want us to be. Louis Agassiz, when he took the daguerreotypes of my enslaved ancestors, he could care less about who they were and what their true legacy was. It was about what he wanted them to be: symbols of Black inferiority. So he created the narrative to promote that propaganda, to poison the imagination of people who would read about this pseudoscience.What our oral history does is it corrects the narrative and it tells our true story. It offers a truer picture of who we are as people. It’s embraced in the Black community in a way that is not often celebrated outside of it, because I think we, as people of color, understand the value. You know, I was always taught that enslaved people were illiterate. And as I grow and learn now in my mid-60s, I learned that that was a myth. That there were actually many literate enslaved people who could just not go out and celebrate their literacy and boast about it because they could be killed. But we were taught to believe that enslaved people were illiterate, and that’s just simply not true.H: And that’s one of the things that you’ve spoken about with regards to Papa Renty — his efforts to learn to read and write, even though he was risking his life.TL: Yes, exactly, and to teach others. And I believe that there were so many others like him, who didn’t publicly boast about their literacy, who were proud of it but had to keep it close to the vest.H: Harvard has put out a lot of public statements over the years. They’ve spoken in the courtroom, and they’ve also spoken in the press and in the court of public opinion. And one of the things that they’re saying now — fresh off my email inbox, in response to a request for comment — is that actually, they’ve long supported this outcome, in which the images end up at another museum. TL: You know, they never stop. That’s so dishonest. When I read that, I had to go in my emails to find an article from 2018 [Norwich Bulletin, July 22, 2018] where they said that they were going to keep these daguerreotypes in perpetuity, because “that’s what museums do.” And I remember it hurt me, the tone and tenor of Harvard’s comments were so dismissive of me, dismissive of my legacy. They know that it wasn’t until the case was proceeding and they were losing ground that they started to give consideration to the artifacts going somewhere else. The discussions didn’t start to happen until the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision, when they took a real beating. It was a 91-page indictment of them, and it’s at that point that they stopped saying publicly that the daguerreotypes were theirs. I’m a good receipt-keeper and I keep all emails —H: Well, you’d make a good journalist then.TL: And this is the other thing about Harvard’s statement. [“While we are grateful to Ms. Lanier for sparking important conversations about these images, her claim to ownership of the daguerreotypes created a complex situation, especially because Harvard has not been able to confirm that Ms. Lanier is related to the individuals in the daguerreotypes.”] When Harvard writes about the daguerreotypes and speculate, they don’t have any real sources of information. What I have is official government records. I have death records, cemetery records, probate records, all linking me and my family to the slaveholder Benjamin Franklin Taylor. My ancestors are buried on the slaveholder’s land. Renty’s children are buried on that land, in Columbia, South Carolina; in Charleston, South Carolina; and in Mount Meigs, Montgomery, Alabama. My ancestors and the Taylors, the slaveholders, are together. There’s so much that tells the story of my lineage that they have refused to look at. To publicly try to discredit my heritage, my genealogy, is, firstly, poor scholarship for a major institute like Harvard, and secondly, a blatant denial of truth.H: One of the things that one of your attorneys, Ben Crump, said during the press conference about the settlement, which stuck with me, was that “it’s never a wrong time to do the right thing.”TL: Yes. The time is always right to do the right thing. And to be honest, Harvard has not come to this place of reckoning based on their own grace or goodwill. They were forced into this position by the legal case and the momentum that we were gaining in court. They were forced to be where they are today and to surrender the daguerreotypes. It wasn’t like there was this sudden awakening or this sudden realization of, you know, “this is a moral and ethical thing that we do based on our complicity with slavery, we do this as a way of atoning for that age-old wrong …” — No. They’re doing it because, again, they were put in a position where they could not do anything else. H: Well, it’s because you fought.TL: Me and my attorneys. I am so incredibly blessed to have attorneys like Ben Crump and Josh Koskoff, because, you know, taking on Harvard is not an easy task. Harvard has astronomical wealth and resources, and they have dragged this case out for six years. Most firms can’t afford to do that, but every step of the way, my attorneys fought, and that is why we have the settlement.H: And in the case of Crump, an attorney with such a trajectory of supporting Black individuals in this nation, representing the families of those who have been killed by police violence and White vigilante violence [George Floyd and Trayvon Martin], does this feel like a full circle moment?TL: You know, it’s funny, because a couple of times in the press conference, I got emotional. And I’m not an emotional person. I don’t cry. I really don’t. But I remember when Ben Crump was speaking at Reverend Al Sharpton’s conference [in 2018], and I had just been so beat up by Harvard and feeling like no one was going to be willing to challenge this very powerful and wealthy institution — and there was Ben, challenging some of the most difficult opponents of police reform, police accountability, civil rights. And I remember thinking when he talking that he might be the person who had the courage to stand up to Harvard. There were probably 500 to 600 people, it was a packed room, and I was not close to where Ben was. But I knew he was wrapping up and that I had to make my way to that stage. I navigated through the room, pressing my way forward, and I remembered making it to the stage, pulling out that image of Papa Renty, and telling him that this was my enslaved ancestor, and that he was basically a prisoner of Harvard’s. And I said, “You know this is a reparations case, right?” And he believed me. He believed in me. And the rest is history.H: This decision also comes at a tenuous time for this country, to say the least. I mean, Harvard is embroiled in its own legal struggle with the Trump administration, which is neither here nor there, but also feels relevant …TL: Yeah, and I’ll just be very candid and painfully honest with you: I have no tears for Harvard Corporation. I speak of Harvard, but it’s not Harvard per se. The Harvard students have been amazing, faculty has been amazing, the community has embraced me and helped me beyond measure. It’s the overseers, the Harvard board of overseers, the Harvard Corporation, that is the bully. There is a poetic justice about seeing bullies finally get their just due. And that’s kind of where I am right now.H: Aside from Harvard’s issues, the Trump administration is attempting to distort the history of Black individuals in this country, and in particular has done so by exerting undue influence on museums. How will an institution like the International African American Museum be a better steward of your ancestors’ images?TL: It’s home. It’s a homecoming. It’s personal for South Carolina, and it’s an extension of who they are. Their prodigal sons and daughters are coming home, and they will celebrate them in a way that Harvard never could, because of their dirty hands. For Renty and Delia to go to their home state, the state where they lived, died, and are buried, is an act of repatriation. And so there is nothing that I could see that would be negative about a museum telling its own story, and telling it in a way that corrects the narrative and restores humanity. It’s just a way of giving power back to those who have been so wrongfully impacted over the years without any redress, without reparations. This is a way we begin to firstly acknowledge and then begin to repair the harms caused by slavery.H: And you, Tamara, are going down in history — I mean, you’re the name of a movement. You’re not the only one of course, but your name signifies so much to so many people who have hope. How does that feel?TL: Yeah, that’s still a part of that numbness that I have. Reality is slowly starting to sit in and it’s really quite emotional. It’s heavy. I go back to my mother and — our last moments together were about Papa Renty. Before she transitioned, when she could talk, that is what we talked about. I promised her that I would document the legacy of Papa Renty and our ancestors, and I didn’t know what the heck I was doing when I said that, but I knew it made her happy. Later, I wrestled with the fact that my mom went to her glory believing that this work would be done, and it had to be done. I just initially wanted, when I reached out to Harvard, to tell Papa’s true story. Celebrate him for who he was. This person of excellence, this educator, this community person, this religious person who accomplished, in spite of the restraints of slavery, amazing things. Each time they dismissed me, it was a slap in the face to me, my mother, and Papa Renty. It motivated me in ways that I can’t describe. It made me dig deeper, work harder to prove these things. I never set out to sue Harvard. I only asked them to tell the truth. But they made this what it is — they turned my genealogy book that I promised my mom I would write into a great American epic story, just because they forced me to fight with them.H: I think your mother is probably smiling from above today, if I had to guess.TL: It warms my heart. And you know, there’s a part of me that knows that she has been with me every step of the way. That she knows what she had a role in doing. This is a victory not just for our family, but all descendants of American chattel slavery, of all of those stolen legacies, stolen lives, and plundered property. This is just a very small measure of victory for all of us.