Yale University apologized for its connection to slavery after several years of research and study it conducted into its formative ties to the slave trade.
The Ivy League institution intensified its desire to confront its ties to slavery in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis in 2020, and they have now admitted that “this is a truth we have to face.”
Yale has promised to do better, including expanding its research partnerships with historically black colleges and universities across the country.
After a four-year research project, Yale issued a statement saying: “We recognize our university’s historical role and its associations with slavery, as well as the work, experiences, and contributions of slaves to the history of our university”.
“We apologize for the ways in which Yale leaders, throughout our early history, participated in slavery.”
“This project is really an attempt to search for that kind of truth, to search for ‘Truth and Light,'” Yale President Peter Salovey said in the photo.
A view of Yale University’s central campus from the Harkness Tower
The desire to confront racist legacies in the United States gained momentum in 2020 after the death of George Floyd, a Black man killed by a Minneapolis police officer.
In recent years, a growing number of institutions have formally apologized for their historic role in the transatlantic slave trade.
Since October 2020, members of the Yale & Slavery Research Project have conducted research on the New Haven, Connecticut-based university’s ties to slavery and made their findings public.
‘Although there were no known records of Yale University owning slaves, many of Yale’s Puritan founders owned slaves, as did a significant number of Yale’s early leaders and other prominent members of the university community, and the Project Research has identified more than 200 of these enslaved people,” the statement said.
“Acknowledging and apologizing for this history is only part of the path forward,” the statement added.
Most of those who were enslaved identify as black, but some identify as indigenous.
Some of the enslaved participated in the construction of Connecticut Hall, the oldest building on campus. Others worked in cotton fields, rum refineries and other punishing places in Connecticut or elsewhere.
“His exhausting work benefited those who contributed funds to Yale,” the statement said.
Yale University apologized for its connection to slavery after several years of research and study it said it conducted into its formative ties to the slave trade.
“This project is really an attempt to search for that kind of truth, to search for ‘Truth and Light,'” said Yale President Peter Salovey.
‘Lux et Veritas, that is our motto. And sometimes the truths are hard, sometimes difficult. But this is a truth we have to face.”
The project’s findings also revealed that prominent members of the Yale community joined with New Haven leaders and citizens to stop a proposal to build a college in New Haven for black youth in 1831, which would have been the first black college in the United States. .
School leaders say there will now be a continued commitment to repairing past damage.
“Acknowledging and apologizing for this history is only part of the path forward,” the university said.
New programs are planned to fund training for public school teachers in his predominantly black hometown of New Haven, Connecticut.
Yale will also expand previously announced research partnerships with historically black colleges and universities across the country, with a “significant new investment” to be announced in the coming weeks.
Elihu Yale and members of his family sit at a table with tobacco pipes and wine glasses, while an enslaved boy with a metal collar around his neck looks on
David W. Blight, the Yale historian who led the historical research, said the purpose of the effort was not to “throw nasty stones at anyone” but to present the university’s history honestly and unflinchingly.
‘What this project demonstrates, as others have demonstrated elsewhere, is that universities really can do this. “You can actually dig up your past, face it, write it down, make changes and get some degree of reward,” he said.
Yale’s connections to slavery are not a revelation. In 2001, for Yale’s 300th anniversary, a group of graduate students issued an independent report on the school’s connections to slavery, focusing on the fact that many of its residential colleges were named after slave owners, but some They dismissed the effort as a partisan coup.
The university later began to settle scores over its connections in 2017, when it renamed a residential college that honored a 19th-century alumnus and former U.S. vice president who was an ardent supporter of slavery.
The Ivy League university changed its name to Calhoun College in honor of pioneering computer scientist Grace Murray Hopper, a mathematician who earned degrees from Yale in the 1930s, invented a pioneering computer programming language, and became a Navy rear admiral. .
A stained glass window depicting slaves at Yale’s former Calhoun College. The university was renamed in 2017.
The residential college was named after Calhoun when it was established in the early 1930s, but has since been renamed
Controversy over the legacy of former Vice President John C. Calhoun had been simmering for years and erupted with protests on campus in 2015.
Calhoun, a member of the Yale Class of 1804, was a senator from South Carolina and a leading voice among those who opposed the abolition of slavery. He served as vice president from 1825 to 1832.
‘John C. Calhoun. White supremacist. Ardent defender of slavery as a positive good,’ Salovey noted. “Someone whose views hardened throughout his life essentially died criticizing the Declaration of Independence and his emphasis on all men being created equal.”
The residential college was named after Calhoun when it was established in the early 1930s.
The university also removed a glass panel in the common room that showed a slave kneeling at Calhoun’s feet after a 1992 student campaign.
The name received new attention as protesters on campuses across the country called for universities to address the legacy of historical figures, such as Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University in New Jersey.
The former president was a supporter of segregationist policies. The Ivy League institution eventually removed its name from the school and at the same time removed an ‘overly festive’ mural of Wilson from the campus dining hall.
Meanwhile, in 2016 Harvard installed a plaque on campus recognizing the slaves who used to work at the school before the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts.