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. 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.”