“A narrative of survival and resolve.”
- Hollywood Reporter
The Story
“The question is, who owns the rights to the violence of the past? Is it the victim or the perpetrator? ”
FREE RENTY tells the story of Tamara Lanier, an African American woman determined to force Harvard University to cede possession of daguerreotypes of her great-great-great grandfather, an enslaved man named Renty. The daguerreotypes were commissioned in 1850 by a Harvard professor to "prove" the superiority of the white race. The images remain emblematic of America’s failure to acknowledge the cruelty of slavery, the racist science that supported it and the white supremacy that continues to infect our society today. The film focuses on Lanier and tracks her lawsuit against Harvard, and features attorney Benjamin Crump, author Ta-Nehisi Coates and scholars Ariella Azoulay and Tina Campt.
WNYC Interview
All Of It w/ Alison Stewart
Watch the Film
Stream Online
In-Person Screenings
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Institutions that have already hosted a screening of FREE RENTY include Harvard , Yale and Brown universities.
2022 Festival Screenings
The Trailer & Clips
While Tamara Lanier challenges Harvard to return daguerreotypes of her ancestors taken by violence, cultural institutions around the world are confronting the fact that their collections are replete with plunder from other countries and peoples. Harvard has 30 million artefacts, objects, and specimens in its collection. If they give Lanier the daguerreotypes of Renty and Delia, what else will they have to return?
As America grapples with a noxious history of white supremacy, Tamara Lanier's battles with Harvard University to claim her heritage - a daguerreotype seized violently of her great-great-great grandfather, an enslaved man named Renty. Free Renty centers on Lanier's struggle for justice, freedom and dignity for her ancestor.
Film Protagonists
Tamara Lanier
Renty’s Great, Great, Great Grandaughter
A 27 year veteran of the State of Connecticut Judicial Branch, retiring in 2017 as a Chief Probation Officer, Tamara K. Lanier has a long and distinguished record of public service and social advocacy.
She has been a Commissioner for the City of Norwich Ethics Commission; a member of the U.S. Attorney’s working group to monitor federal and state civil rights compliance with educational institutions; and engaged with Connecticut’s Racial Profiling Prohibition Board. In 2015, Lanier was named Woman of the Year by the Connecticut General Assembly’s Commission on Afro-American Affairs. In 2016, she received the Connecticut Commission of Human Rights and Opportunities’ Leaders and Legends Award, and in 2019 its Inspirational Women’s Award. Currently, she is the Vice President of the New London NAACP, and was recently appointed by Governor Ned Lamont to the States first Hate Crime Advisory Council.
Benjamin Crump
Attorney Benjamin Crump is a nationally known advocate for civil rights and social justice. He represents the families of the men and women whose tragic deaths ignited the Black Lives Matter movement; Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. Attorney Crump is the founder of the firm Ben Crump Law in Tallahassee Florida.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning author and journalist. He is the author of the bestselling books The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, The Water Dancer, and Between The World And Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. His first novel, The Water Dancer, was released in September 2019. He was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship that same year.
Photo by Gabriella Demczuk.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is a professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature, film essayist and curator of archives and exhibitions. Her books include: Potential History – Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012), The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008) and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950 (Pluto Press 2011). Among her films: Un-documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019), Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47-48 (2012). Among her exhibitions Errata (Tapiès Foundation, 2019, HKW, Berlin, 2020), and Enough! The Natural Violence of New World Order, (F/Stop photography festival, Leipzig, 2016).
Tina Campt
Tina Campt is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art, and the author of four books: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (2004), Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (2012), Listening to Images (2017), and most recently, A Black Gaze (2021).
Josh Koskoff
Attorney Josh Koskoff is known for his creativity and for his passion in service to his clients and their pursuit of justice. In addition to representing Tamara Lanier in her groundbreaking case against Harvard, Josh currently represents nine families who lost children and loved ones in the Sandy Hook School shooting on December 14, 2012 against Remington Arms Company – the maker of the Bushmaster AR-15 rifle used at Sandy Hook. Nobody in history had been able to get through the gun industry’s strong federal immunity to reach gun manufacturers to hold them accountable for their sales and marketing practices. But Josh along with indispensable help from his Koskoff colleagues beat long odds, winning a landmark decision from the CT Supreme Court in 2019. In 2018, Josh was selected to become a member of the Inner Circle of Advocates – widely known as being the most elite organization of the plaintiff’s bar and limited to the nation’s top 100 trial attorneys. He regularly lectures and teaches in all areas of trial practice.
GlobeDocs Film Festival
Thank you to everyone who saw the film virtually and to those who attended the world premiere screening and panel discussion at GlobeDocs Film Festival! We were incredibly proud to premiere at Globe Docs 2021. Watch the Q&A that followed, featuring Tamara Lanier, Josh Koskoff, and filmmaker David Grubin.
The Supreme Court of Massachusetts Hearing
On November 1, 2021, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts heard the case of Harvard v. Lanier. Watch excerpts from the hearing below or the full hearing here.
Representing Tamara Lanier, Ben Crump argues before the Massachusetts Supreme Court that Harvard has no legal claim to the daguerreotypes of Lanier's ancestors. It's time to #Free Renty.
Arguing before the Massachusetts Supreme Court, Harvard's attorney cannot identify Harvard's property rights in the daguerreotypes.
In a hearing before the Massachusetts Supreme Court to dismiss Tamara Lanier's lawsuit, Harvard's attorney argues that Harvard owns the daguerreotypes of Papa Renty, but the judges challenge him.
The Massachusetts Supreme Court make it clear to Harvard's attorney that the law governing ownership of photographic images is not settled when images are taken by violence.
The Filmmaker
David Grubin
Free Renty, Director/Producer
David Grubin is a director, writer, producer, and cinematographer whose films range across history, art, poetry, and science, winning every major award in his field, including two Alfred I. Dupont awards, three George Foster Peabody prizes, five Writer's Guild prizes, and ten Emmys.
His films include The Trials of Robert Oppenheimer, The Buddha, Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided; LBJ; Truman; TR: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt; FDR, The Secret Life of the Brain, The Jewish Americans, Kofi Annan, Center of the Storm, Tesla, The Mysterious Human Heart, Language Matters with Bob Holman, Degenerate Art, In the Beginning Was Desire.
Grubin has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, has been a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, and is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Hamilton College. A former chairman of the board of directors of The Film Forum, he is currently a member of the Society of American Historians, and sits on the board at Poets House. Grubin has taught documentary film producing in Columbia University's Graduate Film Program, and has lectured on filmmaking across the country.
Film Crew
Deborah Peretz
Film Editor
Deborah Peretz is an award winning film editor with over twenty-five years of experience editing documentary films. She has collaborated on many projects with highly accomplished directors such as David Grubin (PBS’s The Buddha ), Susan Lacy (HBO’s SPIELBERG), and Tom Jennings (Frontline’s Right to Fail), among others. She is currently editing a film for Jules and Gedeon Naudet.
Some of her other credits include Tulsa Burning, Notre Dame de Paris, Inventing David Geffen, LennoNYC,, The Trials of Robert Oppenheimer, Brothers On the Line, The Secret Life of the Brain, Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind and R.F.K. A lifelong New Yorker, she lives with her husband in Morningside Heights.
Xavier Muzik
Film Composer
Xavier Muzik is a composer out of Los Angeles, currently based in New York. He is pursuing his Master's Degree in Music Composition from The Mannes School of Music at The New School, where he studies with Jessie Montgomery. Xavier is also seeking a minor in Creative Community Development to empower communities of historically oppressed people to sustainably engage with the world through art and music on their own terms. As a Black man of mixed racial heritage, Xavier struggles with his relationship to his racial identity and how it intersects with his privilege and oppression. Both music and community engagement have enabled him to explore this relationship and independently define his racial identity. Xavier is learning to engage with the quality of his Blackness, as opposed to the quantity, enabling him a broad exploration of his identity divorced from the dark legacy of race as a function of biology.
Michael Bacon
Film Composer
Michael Bacon’s recent projects include the original score for “Stevenson-Lost and Found,” the ongoing “Finding Your Roots” hosted by Henry Lewis Gates (a ten-part PBS Series), and ‘Master Maggie” premiering last year at Tribeca. Bacon won an Emmy for his score “The Kennedys,” an Ace Award nomination for his score “The Man Who Loved Sharks,” the BMI Television Music Award, and The Chicago International Film Festival Gold Plaque Award for music in “LBJ.” Shows he has scored have won numerous Emmy Awards and three Academy Awards (“The Johnstown Flood,” “A Time For Justice,” and “King Gimp”). Jerry Lee Lewis, Carlene Carter, Peter Yarrow, and Claude Francois are just a few artists who have recorded songs written by Bacon. In addition, he and his brother, Kevin, perform music live as “The Bacon Brothers.” Their 10th CD was released in the summer of 2020. Bacon has a degree in music from Lehman College, where he studied composition and orchestration with John Corigliano. He‘s now an associate professor of music at Lehman College. His “Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra” received its world premiere with the Knickerbocker Orchestra in NYC. He lives in New York City with his wife, Betsy, and enjoys sailing.
Sam Russell
Director of Photography
Sam Russell is a filmmaker and cinematographer whose work has been featured on Showtime, HBO, PBS, and Netflix, among others. He began his career shooting films for PBS and its flagship program "Frontline." Sam served as director of photography on the series "Finding Your Roots" with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies" for Ken Burns, and the features "Far From The Tree" and “Slay The Dragon” for Participant Media. His award-winning feature documentary, "By Blood," screened at film festivals around the world and broadcast on the public television series "America Reframed." His short, "Papertown," premiered on PBS. Beyond his work on Free Renty, this past year Sam developed a documentary series for Hulu, directed a series of shorts for the New Yorker, and shot a feature for Netflix and Story Syndicate.
Take Action
The struggle to #FreeRenty continues. On Monday, November 1, The Supreme Court of Massachusetts heard Tamara Lanier's appeal of a lower court decision to dismiss her lawsuit against Harvard. The hearing has been archived and can be streamed online here.
The judges gave no indication of when they would render their verdict. The fight to Free Renty continues. We still need your support.
Email Harvard President Lawrence Bacow and demand that the university surrender the images of Papa Renty and Delia to Tamara's family
Sign The Petition to Stop Harvard University from using property law to maintain ownership of slave images
You can find out more about the fight to Free Renty via the Harvard Free Renty Coalition