AFRICAN-AMERICAN writer Tamara Lanier’s memoir From These Roots: My Fight with Harvard to Reclaim My Legacy hits the shelves on January 28.
The book tackles the author’s commitment to documenting the story of her ancestor Papa Renty, about whom she knew very little. However, she was motivated by his stories that she grew up hearing from her mother, whose dying wish was to tell her children about Papa Renty.
The activist’s research resulted in her discovering one of the first-ever photos of enslaved people from Africa that pictured a dark-skinned man with short-cropped silver hair and chiselled cheekbones - Renty.
“Immediately, I knew that was the man that I had heard so many stories about, my entire life,” she said in an interview, recalling the moment.
“I remember just staring, trapped in a gaze where I’m just staring and staring in his eyes, and I felt like he was staring back at me,” she added.
That was the beginning of Tamara’s quest to trace her genealogical bloodline to Papa Renty, which put her in a legal battle against Harvard. She found the photo at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. It raises the question: Who claimed and acquired the artefacts and remnants of America’s history, the institutions or the surviving descendants?
“When you read this book, you’ll have an amazing understanding of who Papa Renty was. I want readers to feel with me when I’m going through these slave indexes,” she noted.