Renty Taylor

Renty Taylor was born around 1775 in the Congo; his birth name is unknown.[1] He was captured by slave traders and arrived in New Orleans on a Spanish slave ship around 1800.[1] He was eventually purchased by Col. Thomas Taylor (1743–1833) during the early 1800s and he eventually made his way to the "Edgehill" plantation at Columbia, South Carolina.[2]

In 1850 Louis Agassiz commissioned daguerreotypes, described as "haunting and voyeuristic" of the enslaved Renty Taylor and Taylor's daughter Delia to further his arguments about black inferiority.[3] They are the earliest known photographs of slaves.[4][5][3][6] Agassiz left the images to Harvard and they remained in the Peabody Museum’s attic until 1976 when they were re-discovered by Ellie Reichlin. In 2019 Taylor's descendants sued Harvard for the return of the images and unspecified damages.[7] The lawsuit was supported by forty-three living descendants of Louis Agassiz, they wrote a letter of support that read in part "For Harvard to give the daguerreotypes to Ms. Lanier and her family would begin to make amends for its use of the photos as exhibits for the white supremacist theory Agassiz espoused”, and that everyone must evaluate fully "his role in promoting a pseudoscientific justification for white supremacy."[4]

In 1852, Renty and his daughter's names appeared on a probate inventory of Benjamin F. Taylor's slaves.[8] He eventually took on the name Renty Taylor sometime after the American Civil War ended in 1865.[1] It is unknown when he died and it is also unknown if he was ever freed, although he disappeared from records around three years after Abraham Lincoln had passed the Emancipation Proclamation.