Yale University has issued an apology for its connection to slavery after several years of research and study that it undertook into its formative ties to the slave trade.
The Ivy League institution ramped up its desire to confront its slavery ties in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis in 2020 – and now they’ve admitted ‘this is a truth that we have to confront.’
Yale has vowed to do better – including expanding their research partnerships with historically black colleges and universities across the country.
Following a four-year research project, Yale released a statement saying: ‘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.
‘We apologize for the ways that Yale’s leaders, over the course of our early history, participated in slavery.’
‘This project is an attempt really to look for that kind of truth, look for ‘Truth and Light’, said Yale President Peter Salovey, pictured
A view of Yale University central campus from Harkness Tower
A desire to confront racist legacies in the U.S. picked up momentum in 2020 after the death of George Floyd , a black man who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer
In recent years, a growing number of institutions have formally apologized for their historical role in the transatlantic slave trade.
Since October 2020, members of the Yale & Slavery Research Project have conducted research into links to slavery by the New Haven, Connecticut-based university, making their findings public.
‘Although there were no known records of Yale University owning enslaved people, many of Yale’s Puritan founders owned enslaved people, as did a significant number of Yale’s early leaders and other prominent members of the university community, and the Research Project has identified over 200 of these enslaved people,’ the statement said.
‘Acknowledging and apologizing for this history are only part of the path forward,’ the statement added.
The majority of those who were enslaved are identified as black, but some are identified as Indigenous.
Some of those 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.
‘Their grueling labor benefited those who contributed funds to Yale,’ the statement read.
Yale University has issued an apology for its connection to slavery after several years of research and study that it said it undertook into its formative ties to the slave trade
‘This project is an attempt really to look for that kind of truth, look for ‘Truth and Light’, said Yale President Peter Salovey.
‘Lux et Veritas, that’s our motto. And sometimes truths are hard, sometimes they’re difficult. But this is a truth that we have to confront.’
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 America’s first Black college.
School’s leaders say will there will now be a continuing commitment to repair the damage of the past.
‘Acknowledging and apologizing for this history are only part of the path forward,’ the university said.
It is set to create new programs to fund the training of public schoolteachers for its home city, New Haven, Connecticut, whose population is predominantly black.
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 coming weeks.
Elihu Yale and family members sitting at a table with tobacco pipes and wine glasses, while an enslaved boy with a metal collar locked 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 cast ugly stones at anybody,’ but to present the university’s history honestly and unflinchingly.
‘What this project shows, as others elsewhere have, is that universities can actually do this. You can actually dig out your past, face it, write it up, make changes and make some degree of recompense,’ he said.
Yale’s connections to slavery is 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 face many of its residential colleges were named after slaveholders – but the effort was dismissed by some as a partisan hit job.
The university later began a reckoning over its connections in 2017 when it changed the name of 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 renamed Calhoun College after trailblazing computer scientist Grace Murray Hopper, a mathematician who earned Yale degrees in the 1930s, invented a pioneering computer programming language and became a Navy rear admiral.
A stained-glass window depicting slaves at previously known Calhoun College in at Yale. The college was renamed in 2017
The residential college was named for Calhoun when it was established in the early 1930s but has since been renamed
The controversy over former Vice President John C. Calhoun’s legacy had simmered for years and boiled over with campus protests in 2015.
Calhoun, a member of the Yale class of 1804, was a senator from South Carolina and a leading voice for those opposed to abolishing 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 over the course of his life, died essentially criticizing the Declaration of Independence and its emphasis on all men being created equal.’
The residential college was named for Calhoun when it was established in the early 1930s.
The college also removed a glass panel in the common room showing a slave kneeling at Calhoun’s feet after a student campaign in 1992.
The name received new attention as protesters on campuses around the country called for universities to address the legacies 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 ultimately removed his nam from the school while also removing an ‘unduly celebratory’ mural of Wilson from a campus dining hall.
Meanwhile, in 2016 Harvard installed a plaque on campus recognizing the slaves that used to work at the school before the abolition of slavery from Massachusetts.