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Yale University last week acknowledged that enslaved people contributed to its construction and that slavery was not taken seriously by all people at the university.
“Today, we are acknowledging that slavery and the slave trade are part of Yale’s history -- our history,” Peter Salovey, the president of Yale, said in a speech early in a conference, Yale & Slavery in Historical Perspective. “We do this because moving forward requires an honest reckoning with our past. And because the purpose of our university -- to create, preserve and disseminate knowledge -- calls us to do so.”
Among parts of Yale's history that were acknowledged:
- Enslaved Africans’ labor was used in the mid-18th-century construction of Connecticut Hall, a building in the heart of Old Campus.
- Prominent members of the Yale community joined with fellow New Haven leaders to stop a proposal to build a college for Black students in New Haven in 1831.
- The “reconciliationist” approach to Yale’s Civil War memorial in the rotunda of Memorial Hall -- which inscribes Confederate names in equivalence to those who fought for the United States -- occurred amid a university campaign to recruit students and donors from the U.S. South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
- Yale faculty members played leading roles in the American eugenics movement in the 1920s and 1930s, including three well-known scholars who served on the board of directors of the American Eugenics Society.
Yale plans to now take a number of steps, including the creation of permanent memorial to the enslaved and Indigenous people; a “meaningful increase” in the university’s direct financial support for its home city of New Haven; and collaborations with the nation’s historically Black and tribal colleges and universities.
