Along with releasing a thorough history of the university’s ties to slavery and a list of what it said were the first actions to make some form of reparations. Yale University issued a public apology for the role of its early leaders in slavery.
The decision was made amid heated national discussions about racial justice sparked by the murder of George Floyd, more than three years after Yale launched a significant probe into the university’s ties to slavery, the slave trade, and abolition. Furthermore, it clarifies the school administration’s stated ongoing commitment to repair.
- Advertisement -
In a statement to the campus community, university president Peter Salovey and senior board trustee Josh Bekenstein remarked, “We recognize our university’s historical role in and associations with slavery, as well as the labor, the experiences, and the contributions of enslaved people to our university’s history, and we apologize for the ways that Yale’s leaders, throughout our early history, participated in slavery.”
“Acknowledging and apologizing for this history is only part of the path forward,” they claimed. In addition, the institution is developing new initiatives to finance the preparation of public school teachers for its home city of New Haven, Connecticut, which has a predominately Black populace. Additionally, Yale will make a “significant new investment” that will be revealed in the upcoming weeks to strengthen its previously announced research connections with historically Black institutions and universities throughout the nation.In contrast to Harvard, which pledged $100 million in 2022 to a “Legacy of Slavery Fund,” Yale withheld the whole sum for all of its programs.
The goal of the project, according to Yale historian David W. Blight, who oversaw the historical research, was to tell the university’s past truthfully and unapologetic rather than “to cast ugly stones at anybody,” as he stated in an interview.
Blight noted, “What this project shows, as others elsewhere have, is that universities can actually do this.” He added, “You can actually dig out your past, face it, write it up, make changes, and make some degree of recompense.”
The most recent university to openly confront its historical connections to slavery and its part in upholding racial disparities that persisted long after liberation is Yale, which was established in 1701. Similar initiatives have been carried out at other universities in the past few years, including Brown, Harvard, William & Mary, the University of Virginia, Georgetown, and Emory. Administrators didn’t initially support several of those initiatives, which started out as autonomous (and occasionally unwanted) faculty-led initiatives.
At Yale, slavery is seldom a novel subject. A group of graduate students examined Yale’s historical ties to slavery in 2001 in honor of the university’s 300th anniversary. Their research focused on the fact that several residential colleges at Yale were named for slaveholders. Some criticized that attempt as a biased attack piece, produced by graduate students affiliated with labor organizations embroiled in a legal dispute with the institution. However, race remained a very sensitive subject at Yale, where ties with the surrounding Black population have sometimes been tense. The controversy over the renaming of Calhoun College, an undergraduate residential institution named for antebellum South Carolina senator and Southern secessionist John C. Calhoun, has thrust the university’s past into the national limelight. (In 2017, it was renamed in honor of the groundbreaking computer scientist, Grace Murray Hopper, who rose to the rank of rear admiral in the US Navy.)
Nevertheless, Blight—a renowned expert on the American Civil War and the writer of a Frederick Douglass book that won the Pulitzer Prize—said he was “stunned” when Salovey contacted him in September 2020 to urge him to take on the project.
“This didn’t come from any yearning on the faculty,” he noted. “It came from the president himself.”
According to Blight, he had consented to write a “real narrative history” as opposed to merely a report, provided that he and the group he formed could do so. He claimed that none of the other Yale faculty members who made contributions received compensation. “We wanted to avoid the appearance that we were profiting off of Yale’s story,” he noted.
According to him, they were allowed complete freedom to do their study and the institution did nothing to censor what they published.
The book, the major results of which are also available on a website, starts with the early history of Connecticut, whose economy in the eighteenth century was based mostly on commerce with the West Indies, a slave trade.
According to Blight, one of the most fascinating periods was the antebellum era, during which Yale faculty and students supported opposing views on slavery, and the university, which has tended to emphasize its abolitionist past throughout the 20th century, adopted a policy of what he refers to as “aggressive moderation.” “They just didn’t want to take a side until the 1850s,” he noted. When Yale built a Civil War memorial in 1915, commemorating dead graduates from both the North and the South without making a difference between their causes, that spirit was once again visible.
“The entire memorial designed to make them utterly equal,” Blight said. “There’s no victory, no defeat — just valor.”
A large portion of the Yale tale is consistent with research conducted at similar universities like Princeton, which also taught a sizable number of sons of Southern planters, and Brown, which was established by a well-known New England slave-trading family.
In contrast to certain institutions, most notably Georgetown, Yale did not seem to have ever been the owner of slaves. However, the book goes into detail on how much the school’s namesake, Elihu Yale, benefited from the slave trade.
The history of the Black community in New Haven and its often-tense relationship with the university is also given a lot of attention in this 448-page book, which will be given away for free to nearby schools, libraries, and other organizations.
The book describes how, in 1831, municipal and university authorities banded together to thwart plans for a proposed Black youth college that would have been the nation’s first Black institution, according to the writers. The university, which employs most people in the city, characterized the New Haven public education program as an attempt to make up for this “lost opportunity” in its statement. Some participants at the book’s publication celebration in New Haven on Friday donned buttons honoring the 1831 college plan with the phrase “Knowledge Is Power.” Speaking during one of the project’s working group meetings, Charles Warner Jr., a resident of New Haven, expressed his optimism that the initiative would respond to the need for “justice and jobs.”
Says Warner, the novel is “a companion to the true Yale and slavery story, the story formed in flesh and written in blood, the story of people.”
Blight stated that during the investigation, the group had discussions with community members, students, and alumni where the topic of restitution came up frequently.
“At least the second question was always ‘What are the reparations going to be?’” he claimed.
In addition to acknowledging the 2001 graduate student report, Salovey, who will retire this spring, announced at a recent event that the institution will form a committee to get wide feedback for future attempts to atone for Yale’s past.
The following comment was given by him about the Rev. Alexander Crummell, a Black theologian who attended Yale in the 1800s but was not allowed to register as a student or participate in class: “We read the future by the past.”
