Description
Book SynopsisOne woman’s unrelenting mission to reclaim her ancestors’ history and honor their lineage pits her against one of the country’s most powerful institutions: Harvard UniversityTamara Lanier grew up listening to her mother’s stories about her ancestors. As Black Americans descended from enslaved people brought to America, they knew all too well how fragile the tapestry of a lineage could be. As her mother’s health declined, she pushed her daughter to dig into those stories. Tell them about Papa Renty, she would say. It was her mother’s last wish.
Thus begins one woman’s remarkable commitment to document that story. Her discovery of a nineteenth-century daguerreotype at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, one of the first-ever photos of enslaved people from Africa, reveals a dark-skinned man with short-cropped silver hair and chiseled cheekbones. The information read “Renty, Cong
