The descendent of a black American slave has sued Harvard University, claiming the college profits off images of her alleged ancestor.
The pictures, commissioned in 1850 by a professor seeking to prove that blacks were an inferior species, is believed to among the first photos of US slaves.
Tamara Lanier’s lawsuit says the school is “perpetuating the systematic subversion of black property rights”.
It comes as several US universities grapple with their racist histories.
Harvard spokesman Jonathan Swain told the Associated Press the university “has not yet been served, and with that is in no position to comment on this complaint”.
The images, which were daguerreotypes, an early type of photograph, were made in a studio in South Carolina, and show a man known as Renty, stripped naked to the waist, along with his daughter Delia.
The pictures were commissioned by Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz, who used them to argue for slavery in the US.
Ms Lanier, a retired probation officer who claims to be the great-great-great-granddaughter of Renty, asks in her lawsuit for Harvard to return the images to her family, pay unspecified damages to her and acknowledge that it was “complicit in perpetuating and justifying the institution of slavery”.
According to her complaint: “By denying Ms Lanier’s superior claim to the daguerreotypes, Harvard is perpetuating the systematic subversion of black property rights that began during slavery and continued for a century thereafter.”
The images were discovered in 1976 in a storage attic at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
According to unearthed records, Renty was born in Congo.
