Yale University acknowledged historical ties to slavery and issued an extraordinary apology after several years of research revealed the extent of the school’s involvement in slavery and the lucrative ways in which its early leaders benefited.
Yale announced a range of initiatives and actions it planned to pursue in light of an internal review by the Yale and Slavery Research Project that found some of the school’s founders owned slaves.
“Today, on behalf of Yale University, 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 President Peter Salovey said in the statement.
“Confronting this history helps us to build a stronger community and realize our aspirations to create a better future,” Salovey said.
The university also published a report that chronicles the research — titled “Yale and Slavery: A History” — written by Yale history professor David W. Blight, who won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in history for his biography, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.”
There were several other eye-opening facts in the report, including that the school’s oldest campus building, Connecticut Hall, was constructed with ”the labor of enslaved people.”
Researchers also found that in 1831, prominent members of the Yale community, along with lawmakers in New Haven, opposed the establishment of America’s first Black college.
“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…
Read the full article here
