Tamara Lanier’s Fight to Reclaim Her History Could Be Any One of Ours

Imagine if you learned that photographs of your enslaved ancestors had been rediscovered in a museum at Harvard. Then imagine how you would feel if someone told you that you have no right to those photographs.

Such is the plight of Tamara Lanier, who has taken on the Ivy League behemoth to secure the rights to the photos, which languished in a drawer out of sight and away from the public eye for years. The daguerreotypes depict women and men, breasts and genitalia exposed, their haunting stares a riveting…