FROM THESE ROOTS

Battling on behalf of enslaved forebears.

This inspiring memoir features unforgettable dialogue: “We’re going to Columbia, South Carolina, to spend the weekend with the family who enslaved our ancestors!” So Lanier tells her daughters, announcing a remarkable development in a long campaign. Her goal: compel Harvard University to hand over images of her great-great-great grandfather Renty Taylor and his daughter Delia, enslaved in the 19th century and treated as “specimens” to be studied. Lanier’s memoir begins in 2010, when she promises her dying mother that she’d chronicle her family’s history. She serendipitously mentions the project to the owner of an ice cream shop near her Connecticut home. Turns out he’s a “genealogical whiz.” With his help, she discovers that Renty and Delia are among seven enslaved people seen in infamous daguerreotypes commissioned in 1850 by Louis Agassiz, a Harvard professor with repugnant white supremacist theories. Lanier informs Harvard of her lineage but is thwarted by “academic arrogance.” Nevertheless, she persists. A phone call to the family that enslaved her relatives leads to a powerful moment, with Lanier “sitting in a chair hand-carved by” Prince Thompson, another ancestor. She also collaborates with descendants of Agassiz on a public appeal for Harvard to surrender the images, which the school published on a textbook cover and projected on a large screen at an academic conference, while denying similar requests from Lanier. Her 2019 lawsuit didn’t force Harvard to give up the daguerreotypes, but in a decision by Massachusetts’ highest court, justices cited strengths in Lanier’s claim and ruled that she could sue Harvard for emotional distress. This “marked the first time,” Lanier writes, “that a descendant” of enslaved people was “afforded the opportunity to seek accountability from an American institution for the atrocities caused by slavery.”

A stirring first-person account of holding powerful institutions responsible for abetting slavery.