How Yale can help make historical amends

Dear Yale President Peter Salovey and Law School Dean Heather Gerken,

I am a 2003 graduate of Yale University. As a Bridgeport native, it was always a dream to attend Howard University and Yale. These schools were the epitome of the finest education a young person could secure, so we thought. But recently, I learned about a very sad footnote in Yale’s prestigious history: the horrific blocking of a Negro College.

I attended Yale to earn a master’s degree after completing two degrees at Howard while raising four children. I had a wonderful experience. But while attending Yale, I also noticed two New Havens: One of incredibly decent, hard-working lowto moderate- income people. The other New Haven: members of the Yale community living great successful lives, but seemingly out of touch with the Elm City around them and almost removed from the rampant violence, poverty and poor school systems. I always wondered how Yale could sit in the epicenter of such urban blight and struggles, yet be one of the richest and best-known universities on the planet with $30.3 billion in its endowment.

This is greater than the gross national product for many developing countries and enough money to build several strong schools, including a Negro College. What’s more telling than the amount of the endowment is the history of the school and its financial windfall from Black labor.

Yale was founded in 1701, during the first century of slavery, and survived for over 164 years on the backs of African-Americans, whose masters used the profits, free labor and benefits of the slave trade in their kind financial gifts to Yale. In return, Yale established endowments and professorships, allowed the sons and daughters of slave owners to attend and, sadly, even named numerous buildings after slave owners.

The Negro College, Yale and the slave trade

But, more important and for purposes of this open letter, Yale and its leadership played a leading role to ensure the continuation of the slave trade and seemingly met extensively to subvert any desire by abolitionists to better the lives of Blacks with a Negro College.

Specifically, in the early 1800s, Yale’s leadership blocked formation of a Negro College. Courageously, Roger Sherman Baldwin, the great lawyer and former Connecticut governor known for his legal work on the Amistad case, pushed hard with abolitionist Simeon Jocelyn to establish a Negro College, similar to an HBCU like Howard University, Morehouse, Hampton or Spelman.

But New Haven Mayor Mayor Dennis Kimberly, himself a Yale graduate, convened a committee to draft resolutions against the idea. This 13-member committee consisted of Yale leaders and New Haven’s political elite. The committee drafted two resolutions to be voted on Sept. 10, 1831, at a town meeting.

With Yale representatives running things, the first resolutions claimed that the existence of a Black college would harm Yale College and other area white schools. The committee, in raising the fears of the white citizenry, wrote “the establishment of a (Negro) College in the same place to educate the colored population is incompatible with the prosperity, if not the existence of, the present institutions (i.e. Yale) of learning and will be destructive to the best interests of the city.”

The committee of privileged, racist Yale faculty, alumni and staff then shamefully vowed in two resolutions adopted by a 700-4 vote to “use every legal means possible” to block the college and called it “unwarrantable and a dangerous interference” with slavery in the other states and “ought to be discouraged.”

Yale’s leadership role and duty to make this right

As an attorney and graduate of the Howard Law School, I was taught that in the spirit of our alum Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, we are social engineers of change for the good of the community; not social engineers of injustice, as these lawyers above and fellow Yale alums clearly united to accomplish. Sadly, the Yale committee members had one common immoral goal: to make sure slavery maintained and that Yale College continued to flourish. This, they decided, included withholding education and empowerment from Black people.

Indeed, we know Yale is not alone. Last month, Princeton University eliminated the name of former President Woodrow Wilson from its buildings. And, everyone knows Georgetown University acknowledged that the Jesuit school sold 272 slaves to stay afloat financially two centuries ago.

This all leads me to the demand that it is time for Yale to join that group of institutions acknowledging the atrocities, pains and gains made on the backs of the African-American to rectify our dreadful past. In the wake of George Floyd and the mood of America, it is urgent that the Yale president, the law school dean and overall leadership show unequivocally in actions and substantial money allocated that Yale will not sit silent and, as the No. 1 university on the planet, be accountable and set the example. Removing a name from a building does not go far enough.

When Yale’s leadership voted against establishing a Negro College, the damage was insurmountable and caused severe long-term damages to thousands of Blacks and other groups who could have benefited from this institution. We did not see an HBCU come along for another 25 years. Please consider the thousands of lives of people of color that could have been changed and the impact on communities nationwide where those graduates could have gone too and made change.

As a result, I write this demand letter asking for Yale to commit all of its resources, staffing, training and financial investment to the establishment of Roger Sherman Baldwin College or a similarly fitting name, a Negro College established as the first historically black college in the state of Connecticut and probably in New England. And, commit a minimum billion dollars to saving several struggling HBCU’s, including Morris Brown in Georgia.

With Yale’s $30.3 billion dollar endowment reportedly making over a million dollars daily, the annual interest made off this endowment alone could be leveraged to fund a new school similar to what the Rockefellers did.

Lastly, it is with great pain and after much thought that I must consider returning my Yale degree as the first action, among others, if we cannot take the steps necessary to remedy this horrible past.

I look forward to hearing from you as the leaders and hope you will make Yale the great role model and real community corporate citizen that I heard about as a kid growing up just down the road. If not, this becomes a part of your legacy and silence!