Renty Taylor

Renty Taylor (c. 1775 – after c. 1866), also known as Papa Renty, was a man born in the Congo Basin. He was captured and brought to the United States, where he was sold as a slave. He worked on a cotton plantation owned by Benjamin Franklin Taylor (1791-1852). He was one of the subjects of the oldest known photographs of slaves, which were taken in March 1850 by Joseph T. Zealy under the supervision of Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz, whose ideas were used to support the enslavement of Africans in the United States and promote the now-discredited theory of scientific racism.