Yale University apologizes for its role in slavery

Yale University apologizes for its role in slavery

Yale University on Friday became the latest institution to apologize for its connections to slavery, and announced efforts that officials hope will help dismantle some of the lasting effects of this history.

The Ivy League school, which for years has been delving into its ties to slavery, pledged to widely distribute free copies of a scholarly book of its findings. It also announced several new initiatives, such as funding to train and help educators in the surrounding community of New Haven, Conn., as well as a lecture series about Yale’s history with slavery and an exhibit at a local museum.

“We apologize,” Yale President Peter Salovey said Friday. “We apologize for the ways early leaders participated in slavery.”

But the university must do more than acknowledge and apologize for its history, he said; it must respond to those difficult truths.

Salovey said in a statement that the findings “have propelled us toward meaningful action to address the continued effects of slavery in society today.” The efforts announced Friday build on previous commitments from the university, including a scholarship for local high school graduates to attend historically Black colleges and universities that partner with Yale.

On Friday, he said the university will continue to find ways to address that legacy.

“We willingly see and confront our own flaws,” he said.

Yale University’s Connecticut Hall after a renovation that was completed in 1905. The building was constructed in part by enslaved people.

The school is one of hundreds around the world to confront the role of slavery in its past. Last month, Loyola University Maryland acknowledged that it had ties to a 19th-century sale of enslaved people, and a task force recommended that the school continue to examine the university’s history and make its campus more accessible to descendants connected to that sale.

In September, Georgetown University and the Jesuits gifted $27 million to benefit a foundation that helps descendants of enslaved people who were sold to pay off a debt at the school in the 19th century. The university apologized in 2016 for its role in the trading of enslaved people, a move that prompted a group of descendants to call for a $1 billion foundation to promote reconciliation.

The Yale and Slavery Research Project has been working since 2020 to gain a comprehensive understanding of the university’s past. The project has been led by David W. Blight, a Yale professor who is a premier historian on American slavery, and included the help of faculty, staff, students and New Haven residents.

The group’s findings are available in Blight’s newly released book, “Yale and Slavery: A History.” Most of the university’s founders owned enslaved people. The school’s Connecticut Hall was built in part by enslaved people. And prominent members of the Yale community joined with local leaders in 1831 to prevent the founding of a Black college in Connecticut, according to the book.

Yale’s Memorial Hall.

“At Yale University, a multitude of its founders and rectors and presidents, faculty, donors and graduates played key roles in sustaining slavery, its ideological defenses and its power,” Blight said Friday at an event on campus. There were also some who worked to dismantle it, he said, but generally the university and surrounding community worked to maintain the social order.

Yale’s entanglements with slavery have left haunting shadows, he said, “on this campus, in its hometown, in its archives and among its hundreds of thousands of alumni. This book seeks to bring these shadows into the light.”

The Yale and Slavery Research Project, led by Yale professor and American slavery expert David W. Blight, above, has been working since 2020 to gain a broad understanding of the university’s past.

Blight invoked the murder of nine Black people at a church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 by a white supremacist. His book closes with a study of a war memorial at Yale, one he said the audience members have walked past hundreds or thousands of times, he said. “That Civil War memorial is the most significant monument to the Confederate lost cause on northern soil, and a testament to slavery’s unresolved legacy.”

Charles Warner, the chairman of the Connecticut Freedom Trail, who also spoke at the event, choked up as he said that even as they celebrate the book, he will think of the real Yale slavery story: “The story that’s formed in flesh and written in blood. The story of people. The golden center of this story is the lived experience and contributions of people who have the legacies of slavery written on our ancestral stories, and our family names, and our genetic memories.”

The university has important work to do, he said, with the partnerships, scholarships and other initiatives. “The history of Yale and slavery is still being written.”