Yale Apologizes for Its Ties to Slavery

“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, over the course of our early history, participated in slavery,” Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, said in a statement made last week. The university finally acknowledged its early ties to slavery, 250 years later.

David Blight, a noted Civil War historian, led the internal research examination of Yale’s involvement in slavery. Blight’s project has been published and it is available online here.

According to President Salovey:

The Yale and Slavery Research Project has deepened greatly our understanding of our university’s history with slavery and the role of enslaved individuals who participated in the construction of a Yale building or whose labor enriched prominent leaders who made gifts to Yale. Although there are 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 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, and their grueling labor benefited those who contributed funds to Yale.

We also know 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. Additional aspects of Yale’s history are illuminated in the book’s findings, including the Yale Civil War Memorial that honors those who fought for the North and the South without any mention of slavery or other context.

The statement also has plans for educating and ameliorating harms done by Yale. However, while Harvard dedicated $100 million to correcting wrongs done by slavery, and Georgetown set aside millions of dollars, so far Yale has not made any firm commitment in terms of funding.

In coming days I will read the four hundred page book posted by Yale and report back on the university’s involvement with slavery.

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