Edward Bouchet
The story of New Haven's Black education pioneer is finally being told
Playwright Calvin Alexander Ramsey first came to New Haven in 2010 as a guest of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale. The organization had staged a reading of his first play, The Green Book, a two-act work exploring the difficulties Black Americans faced while traveling during the Jim Crow era.
During Ramsey’s stay, he wandered into Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, a grand, Gothic-style edifice. There, he spied a small but well-lit painting of a young Black man. Clearly a historical figure. It struck Ramsey as odd and wonderful that this portrait was placed in a prominent position in one of the ultimate bastions of class and racial privilege. Who was this guy?
A librarian explained that it was Edward Bouchet, a Black educator who graduated from Yale in the 19th century, and she told Ramsey enough about Bouchet to whet his appetite for more. For years, Ramsey gradually gathered scraps of information about Bouchet. It was a mighty compelling story. Bouchet was the son of a formerly enslaved Black father and a free-born Black mother. Remarkably, he graduated with honors from New Haven’s Hopkins Grammar School and Yale College, and was the first Black person to receive a Ph.D. in the U.S. — again, from Yale. He was the sixth person of any race to receive a Ph.D. in physics from an American university.
Yet Bouchet was unable to achieve the career accomplishments that were more readily available to his white classmates. Instead, he served as a teacher at so-called “colored” high schools for his entire career. As a result, Bouchet was virtually unknown in spite of his symbolic importance in American history. So Ramsey decided to write a play about him. “It’s a great untold story that has been dangling out there. I want to give him a voice,” Ramsey says.
Last June, after wrapping up other projects, Ramsey moved to New Haven to work on the Bouchet play in earnest. He lives in a small apartment in the Dwight neighborhood, writing longhand on paper early in the mornings and then spending the afternoons and evenings exploring and socializing, or making presentations to cultural and community groups. Ramsey hopes to have a draft of the play ready for readings or even a performance this spring. The provisional title: Bouchet Lives!
Ramsey is one of a handful of individuals for whom Bouchet has exerted a strong gravitational pull, and who have shined lights on his legacy. These people provide us with a variety of views into Bouchet’s life, updating the story for the 21st century. For many years, the efforts to spotlight Bouchet’s legacy were confined to relatively small circles within academia. If Ramsey’s play is successful, it could reach a much wider audience.
Some of Bouchet’s champions are angry; others are simply determined to do justice or to do good works in the name of this remarkable man who remains a mystery even to those who admire him. All of them seem to share a common goal: helping to remedy a societal wound that refuses to heal — the wound caused by slavery and racism.
In New Haven’s Evergreen Cemetery
stands a polished marble headstone with the image of Edward Bouchet on its façade. Chiseled in the stone are his name, his degrees from Yale, and a few additional details of his academic achievements. The gravestone was placed there in 1998 by Curtis Patton, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health, Judith Schiff, Yale’s chief research archivist, and a handful of other prominent educators. Previously, Bouchet’s grave had been unmarked.
The situation with the gravestone is emblematic of Bouchet’s life story. Little is known about him beyond a few bits of information in the Yale archives, obituaries published in local newspapers, some information about his tenure as a teacher at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, and records he kept while he was the clerk for the St. Thomas African Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. Bouchet didn’t author a memoir. Few letters of his have been found. His Ph.D. thesis is missing from the Yale archives. No professional historian has chronicled his life, and, though a number of non-historians have cobbled together a narrative, they differ with one another on some of the key details. As a result, much of what is thought to be true about Bouchet is conjecture.
This paucity of evidence is partly because, unlike his fellow contemporary Black figures such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, Bouchet did not achieve renown. In spite of his stellar academic achievements, he labored in obscurity. Yet, in some ways, the mysteries surrounding him make his story all the more compelling. How was he able to achieve such distinction at Hopkins and Yale? Who paid for his undergraduate education? Why was he fired so callously by the Institute for Colored Youth after 26 years as a teacher there? When contemplating Bouchet’s remarkable life, one wonders how many stories of other exceptional Black men and women have been buried in the dustbin of history.
Here’s what we know, or what seems likely to be true:
Bouchet’s father, William Bouchet, came to Connecticut from Charleston, S.C., as the servant of John B. Robertson. By some accounts, he arrived when Robertson began his studies at Yale College in 1824. According to the Robertson family, however, the two came north in 1832 when Robertson relocated from Charleston to New Haven. Either way, William Bouchet arrived in Connecticut as an enslaved person and was later granted his freedom by Robertson. (Robertson went on to be mayor of New Haven and to serve as Connecticut’s secretary of the state and in the state Senate.)
Slavery in Connecticut dated back to the arrival of the first European immigrants. After Connecticut became a state, the legislature passed an Act of Gradual Abolition, and, as a result, slavery ended here in 1848.
Once freed, William Bouchet got work as a janitor and became a pillar of the Black community. He married Susan Cooley and they had four children, with Edward being the youngest and the only son. Susan
“Prof. Bouchet was in every respect a typical example of an ideal man. A life of everything that is high, upright, and kind, manifesting the best that was within him.”
— Journal-Courier
Bouchet washed clothing for Yale students, in addition to raising her children.
Young Edward’s academic life got off to a typical start for those times. He attended New Haven’s Artisan Street Colored School. But when he was 14 he broke the race barrier by attending Hopkins, where white, upper-class students were taught in Greek and Latin. He graduated as class valedictorian in 1870. While some believe he was not allowed to give an oration or accept his diploma on stage, there is no record of this in the Hopkins archives.
Then he was off to Yale College, where Bouchet distinguished himself. He graduated in 1874 with highest honors, a class rank of sixth, and election to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society.
He immediately enrolled in graduate school and two years later was granted a Ph.D. in experimental physics, writing his thesis, Measuring Refractive Indices, about properties of light waves. His tuition was paid by the Institute for Colored Youth. When Bouchet was still an undergraduate, the school had contacted him and promised to pay for his graduate studies if he agreed to work there as a teacher. Later, at the institute, he taught mathematics, physics and chemistry.
In Philadelphia, Bouchet became a highly respected member of the African American community. In addition to teaching high school, he gave lectures on science to civic groups. At the time of his arrival, the Institute operated on the principle that Black children should be taught the liberal arts and sciences. However, over time, the school came under the sway of the ideas of Booker T. Washington, who believed African Americans should be trained to be tradespeople, not scholars. Ultimately, the academic faculty members were fired to make way for vocational instructors. Bouchet apparently argued forcefully against the shift in philosophy, and according to one account, he was the only teacher who did not receive a severance payment.
He went on to teach at schools for Black students in Virginia, Missouri and Ohio. While there is no evidence that Bouchet was the victim of racist violence in New Haven or Philadelphia, an account in the archives of Hampton University in Virginia tells of his assault by a prominent white lawyer on the street in that state for accidentally bumping into him.
The Yale archives contain an application Bouchet submitted in 1905 seeking employment as a professor of physics and chemistry. His former physics teacher and mentor, A.W. Wright, wrote a glowing recommendation, calling him a man of “excellent character and marked ability.” Yale didn’t hire Bouchet.
Bouchet returned to New Haven for health reasons in 1916. He never married, fathered no children, and lived with his mother until his death in 1918. An obituary in the city’s Journal-Courier newspaper read, “Prof. Bouchet was in every respect a typical example of an ideal man,” concluding, “A life of everything that is high, upright, and kind, manifesting the best that was within him.”
Bouchet had the makings of a great man, yet in 19th- and 20th-century America he could not land a job that would have enabled him to fulfill his mammoth potential.
On Henry Street in New Haven’s Dixwell neighborhood,
a historically Black community, a mural stretches 36 feet along the side of a brick building. It is a portrait of Bouchet, including three likenesses of him executed in different colors — representing refracted light, a reference to his Ph.D. thesis. The mural is the work of African American artist Kwadwo Adae.
Adae knew nothing of Bouchet until 2019, when he took his son, Kwasi, to Hopkins School to apply for admission. On a wall in the admissions office, Adae saw a photograph of Bouchet. He was surprised and intrigued. Afterward, he set out to learn all he could about Bouchet’s life. The more he learned, the angrier he got. “Why didn’t I know about him already?” Adae asks. “Why do I know of Eli Whitney but not Edward Bouchet? This was a subversion. If he was a white person, we would all know his name.”
Adae, having already produced a number of wall murals around the city, decided to help remedy that. He got funding from the city of New Haven, Yale and Hopkins, and permission to put the mural on the Henry Street wall. He painted during the sweltering summer of 2021, with help from Kwasi.
You can add Adae’s name to the list of people who have been captivated by Bouchet’s story and are determined to retell it.
At the top of the list is Curtis Patton, who is now retired from the Yale School of Public Health. A Black man who was raised in Alabama, Patton first heard of Bouchet in 1952 when he was a freshman at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., a historically Black institution. Patton drank too much at a fraternity party the night before his first class with mathematics professor Lee Lorch, a white man who was a civil rights activist. Patton fell asleep at his desk and Lorch woke him up with a sharp rebuke. The professor then told the class the story of Bouchet. The message was clear to Patton: shame on you.
That incident planted the seeds for Patton’s quest to bring attention to Bouchet’s accomplishments. Patton went on to get a Ph.D. at Michigan State University before being hired by Yale in 1970. At the time, he was one of only a few African American faculty members. Realizing he was in the city where Bouchet had lived, Patton began to explore Bouchet’s life. He found an ally in Judith Schiff, who helped him with research. “I immediately thought we have
to elevate this man,” Patton recalls. “Nobody here at Yale seemed to know anything about him, except Judy.”
To spread the word, Patton wrote a biographical article about Bouchet, got a scholarship established in his name at Michigan State University, and pressed Yale to recognize his accomplishments. Those efforts led eventually to Yale working with Howard University to establish the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society, which provides recognition for promising doctoral students; and the creation of an annual Bouchet conference on diversity in graduate education.
Now 87, Patton wears a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap because his sports hero as a child was Jackie Robinson, who famously broke the color barrier in baseball. He becomes emotional when he speaks about Bouchet. “I had a passion for Edward Bouchet, and I still do,” he says. “That dead man has my heart.” When Patton tells of how he discovered that Bouchet’s grave was unmarked for many years, he starts to weep.
Yet he also shows a steely resolve. “I’m a very unforgiving person — of anybody who abuses another person,” Patton says. “When I was a boy in Birmingham, I knew that people were killing people who looked like me. I remember the girls who were blown up in the 16th Street Baptist Church. I remember Emmet Till. I can’t get over that. I can’t get over it.”
Patton long advocated for a painting to be made of Bouchet and displayed on the campus. Initially, he made little progress. The breakthrough came after Patton talked about Bouchet with John Wilkinson, the headmaster of Hopkins School. After Wilkinson became secretary of Yale University in 1979, he discussed Bouchet with artist Rudolph Zallinger, who volunteered to paint a portrait of him. Wilkinson paid the commission out of his administrative “slush fund” and initially hung it in his own office. “It was a bold statement,” Wilkinson says. “It was the first time Yale had made a painting of a black alumnus.” The painting eventually found its way to Sterling library.
To Wilkinson, Bouchet’s life is a tragedy. “Here was a brilliant man who had done everything that could be expected of a person,” Wilkinson says. “He was rejected by the white world and then his ideas about the education of Black people were rejected by the Black world. His big dreams were not realized.”
Ronald Mickens, an African American physicist, comes at the Bouchet narrative from a different angle — his fascination with scientific pioneers. Like Patton, Mickens, now a retired university professor, learned about Bouchet from Lee Lorch. Mickens attended Fisk as an undergraduate and later got his Ph.D. in physics at Vanderbilt University. Like Patton before him, when Mickens heard about Bouchet, he was smitten.
Mickens set out to tell Bouchet’s story in book form. He cast a wide net to find people with knowledge of Bouchet’s life and times, and he published a collection of essays by them in 2002 under the title
Edward Bouchet: The First African-American Doctorate.
The collection includes essays by Patton and Wilkinson.
Mickens does not consider Bouchet’s story to be tragic. Yes, he says, Bouchet’s ambitions as a scientist and scholar were frustrated, but as a teacher he touched the lives of many thousands of young Black students. “He had a major impact on almost everyone he came in contact with,” Mickens
says. “Black people saw in him the possibilities. What they had been told about their intellects was not true. He inspired his students to go on to better things.”
of the man who held Bouchet’s father and later freed him from slavery. A 1965 Yale graduate, Robertson is a retired partner in the banking firm Brown Brothers Harriman. He first learned of Bouchet when he was visiting his mother in New Haven in the 1990s. During the visit, Robertson noticed an article in the Yale Daily News about Bouchet which his mother had been reading. She told him she knew only a little about Bouchet, but Robertson saw that Curtis Patton had been quoted in the article. He looked him up.
Robertson is sensitive about how the Bouchet story has been told. He points out that the Robertsons were not plantation owners, as some have reported. Rather, they were shopkeepers of modest means. He says he feels no personal guilt about his family’s involvement with slavery, and he takes pride in the fact that John B. Robertson freed Bouchet’s father. “That was a gracious act,” he says. His research has led him to the conclusion that his ancestor probably paid Bouchet’s tuition at Hopkins and Yale College.
In spite of the fact that Robertson went to Yale, his interest in the university languished after he left town. But Bouchet drew him back in. When he expressed interest in giving money in Bouchet’s name, Yale fundraisers introduced him to a small fellowship program that had already been established and he gradually provided most of the funding for what is now called the Edward A. Bouchet Undergraduate Fellowship. The program now supports 10 minority students at Yale University each year. Robertson met some of the students, and their stories touched him. “There’s an opportunity to help people get ahead in life, and to witness it. That’s incredibly rewarding,” he says. “You feel like their lives are being changed and you think of how extraordinary the opportunity to go to Yale was for Bouchet.”
In recent years, students and faculty at Yale have done more to recognize Bouchet. In 2020, a new portrait of Bouchet by Yale School of Fine Arts graduate Mario Moore was installed in the Saybrook College dining hall after it was recommended by students. Showing three stages of his life, the painting portrays as its main subject a middle-aged Bouchet from his days as a teacher at the Institute for Colored Youth. On a table next to him is a portrait of Bouchet as a young Hopkins student, and on the wall is the portrait of Bouchet from his time at Yale, the same portrait that hangs in the Sterling library.
Bouchet’s story triggers powerful emotions in the people who have immersed themselves in it. Patton insists that all white Americans benefited from slavery, whether they owned slaves or not, because the institution drove the growth of the national economy. And he argues that white people today continue to benefit economically from racism. “That’s undeniable and should be acknowledged,” he says. Adae, the artist, visited Bouchet’s grave several times when he was planning his mural project, and he says he felt the man’s presence. “People of color today — we face some difficult challenges. We live in a hateful society. But back in Bouchet’s time, things were much worse,” Adae says. “My message is you have to have the resilience to accomplish whatever your goals are. That’s what Bouchet tells us.”
Heaton Robertson is the descendant
One of Calvin Alexander Ramsey’s author talks in New Haven took place at the Atticus Book Store & Café on Chapel Street. He had been invited to speak about Ruth and the Green Book, his children’s title about a young girl whose family travels in the South in the 1950s. There were only a handful of people in the audience, but Ramsey delivered a heartfelt performance. He paged slowly through the book, showing the audience beautiful illustrations by Floyd Cooper as he told the stories not just of Ruth and her family but of the Green Book itself.
With the full title The Negro Motorist Green Book, this listing of safe places for African American travelers was published from 1936 to 1967 by Victor Green, a Black postman. Ramsey’s telling includes a detailed anecdote about how he learned about the Green Book at a friend’s funeral in Atlanta. “It fell on me by accident,” he says.
Ramsey has been spinning webs with words practically his whole life. He was born in Baltimore, one of eight kids, but the family moved to rural North Carolina when his father, a steelworker, was forced out of work by a long strike. Ramsey’s family nickname was “Rooster” because he talked so much. His younger brother, Dwight, recalls Calvin’s storytelling style admiringly: “He had a great imagination. He had a story for everything. He would use his words to manipulate me in any direction he wanted me to go — to con me out of my candy or a few pennies,” Dwight says.
The family encountered racism in the raw. “We could work in certain restaurants, but we couldn’t eat in them,” Dwight recalls. “White supremacy was in your face. There was no camouflage. In the North, it’s different. They smile in your face and stab you in the back.”
One of the transformational moments in Ramsey’s life came in 1968, when, as a teenager, he was shocked by Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination. He vowed to visit other parts of America because he did not want to believe that hatred had poisoned the entire country. In his younger years, he often hitchhiked to get around, but because he was Black, he frequently wore suits to make himself look “respectable.” At times he was homeless. He has lived in many places, including Georgia, the Caribbean, Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, Massachusetts and New York. He has had a wide variety of jobs including insurance salesman in Atlanta for a number of years. Now divorced, Ramsey has two adult children.
After terrorist-guided airliners struck New York’s Twin Towers in 2001, Ramsey decided to radically alter his life trajectory. He had long harbored the dream of becoming a writer. The 9/11 tragedy grabbed him by the collar and shook him. “I realized that anything can happen to you, so don’t put off your dreams,” Ramsey recalls. In the two decades since then, he has written 12 plays and two children’s books.
His writing projects are often motivated by his pursuit of “the unknown pages in African American history,” he says. Among his plays are the musical Bricktop, which explores the life of Ada Smith, who owned the nightclub Chez Bricktop in Paris from the 1920s to the ’60s; and Damaged Virtues, based on the life of Dr. J. Marion Syms, who was one of the pioneers of modern gynecology but operated without anesthesia on enslaved women. While most of Ramsey’s plays have been staged or at least had readings, he has not yet produced a hit.
In New Haven, in just a few months,
Ramsey has cultivated a rich network of friends. He is a genial, handsome man who frequently wears a blue blazer, repp tie and tan pants. He doesn’t own a car, so he walks nearly everywhere. He has already put his distinctive mark on the community. Wherever he goes, it seems, people are inspired by him or drawn in by his loquacious storytelling style.
One of those people is John Cavaliere, owner of the historic Lyric Hall in New Haven’s Westville neighborhood. He was so inspired by Ramsey’s quest that he has decided to reopen the space as a performance venue. “When Calvin told me about his project, I felt this is a story that needs to be told,” Cavaliere says. “It became clear that the highest and best use of this space was indeed as a theater.” Cavaliere hopes to stage a reading of Ramsey’s play there this year.
Ramsey says since he came to New Haven he has been “peeling away the onion” to get to the essence of Bouchet’s existence. He believes that Bouchet was a quietly fierce man — defending himself and his educational principles when he was fired and teaching with a passion. “I think he had to have some vinegar in him to do what he did,” Ramsey says.
The play starts off in the cemetery, with Bouchet’s elderly mother visiting his grave and encountering two gravediggers, one Black and the other white. She tells them Bouchet’s story, which is portrayed on stage in a series of flashbacks.
Kate Walton, Ramsey’s landlord and friend, appreciates his curiosity and dedication to his subjects. “I think he might be on the cusp of breaking through as a playwright,” she says.
Most of Ramsey’s works deal with race. He wants to change minds, but he does not aim to inflame resentment and hatred. Instead, he teaches empathy. “I’m always about bringing people closer together, the races,” he says. “We often have more in common than we have that’s different.” It’s a bit of a bromide, granted, but, coming from Calvin Alexander Ramsey’s lips, you want to believe it.