Virtual Lecture: Oral History and the African-American Experience

Please join us for this special talk by activist Tamara K. Lanier.

Please visit the Eventbrite page to select tickets then watch this event live via https://quickcenter.fairfield.edu/thequicklive/

Using her family’s oral history as a guide, Tamara K. Lanier successfully traced her ancestry, unearthing a great American story. In 1850, the famed Harvard scientist, Louis Agassiz, commissioned photographer J.T. Zealy to capture nude images of Renty and other African-born enslaved men and women. Pointing to the stark physical differences, Agassiz theorized a dark science alleging that Black people were a separate and inferior species, deserving to be enslaved. These infamous daguerreotypes, images that pirated the pride of Renty and Delia, are in Harvard's collection today. In 1995-6, artist Carrie Mae Weems drew on the daguerrotypes for the series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried. As Renty and Delia's descendant, Tamara Lanier filed a landmark reparations lawsuit against Harvard in 2019 for the return of the daguerrotypes. The lawsuit, conducted with the assistance of civil rights attorneys Benjamin L. Crump and Michael Koskoff, asked the courts to consider – who should own the rights to the violence of the past?

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Usual Suspects. This focuses on the humanity denied in recent killings of black men, women, and children by police. She directs our attention to the constructed nature of racial identity—specifically, representations that associate black bodies with criminality. Our imaginings have real—often deadly—outcomes. Blocks of color obscure faces just as our assumptions around race obscure individual humanity. Through a formal language of blurred images, color blocks, stated facts, and meditative narration, Weems directs our attention toward the repeated pattern of judicial inaction—the repeated denials and the repeated lack of acknowledgement.