Norwich — If the United States could force museums to track down and restore artwork and belongings stolen from Jews during the Holocaust and could track descendants of Japanese Americans interned during World War II to make reparations payments, then the same can be done for the African-American descendants of those enslaved in the United States.

That was the message Norwich resident Tamara Lanier and her attorney, prominent civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, presented to a congressional committee Wednesday during a three-hour public hearing on House of Representatives Bill 40, which proposes to create a commission to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans.

Lanier and Crump provided video testimony Wednesday, with Lanier summarizing her own effort to force Harvard University to release famous photos of what she describes as two of her ancestors to the subjects’ descendants. Lanier called her lawsuit in a Massachusetts court against Harvard a restoration effort akin to the requirements that museums restore stolen artwork to Holocaust survivors and their descendants and to recent laws requiring institutions to return Native American artifacts to their tribes.

“It’s going to be a tricky math problem,” Lanier said later Wednesday, “but even if it’s $5, it’s owed and it’s a debt.”

The bill, which was first proposed by former U.S. Rep. John Conyers in 1989, would not necessarily call for direct payments to descendants of enslaved people but would study the economic, social and political ramifications of generations of oppression and denied opportunities and determine possible ways to correct them.

While Lanier supports that effort as well, she argued that it should be separate and added to the reparations discussion. She considers the horrific human rights violations of enslavement as the basis for reparations. She said the civil rights issues of oppression, denial of job opportunities, equal education, voting rights and social integration are constitutional violations and should be fixed by “doing what the Constitution says, rectify it.”

Lanier filed suit in March 2019 against Harvard and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology after she said she made repeated unsuccessful requests to Harvard to turn over the 1850 images of a man named Congo “Papa” Renty and his daughter, Delia, both slaves in South Carolina. Lanier says she is a direct descendant of Renty and Delia.

Leading Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz commissioned the nude photos of Renty and Delia as part of his attempt to prove Africans were inferior. Lanier argues in the lawsuit that Harvard continues to profit from the images, using them in books and seminars on African-American history and the legacy of slavery.

The lawsuit is progressing slowly. A hearing was held on Oct. 20, 2020 on Harvard’s motion to dismiss the case. Attorneys for the university argued historically, the subjects of photographic images have never been considered the owners of the products, and a reversal of that precedent would be detrimental to news photojournalists documenting world events, including atrocities done to people.

On Wednesday, Lanier told the congressional committee the poignant images of her ancestors “are the plunder of slavery." Crump said her lawsuit against Harvard is “landmark litigation.”

Crump said Lanier has been able to do what many African Americans would never be able to do: trace her family roots back into slavery. Crump said Lanier is pleading with Congress to use the 2016 Holocaust Era Art Recovery Act, which required institutions to track down Holocaust survivors and their descendants, as the basis for reparations to descendants of African American slaves.

c.bessette@theday.com