Yale University issues groveling apology for ‘role in slavery’ after four-year research project that was sparked by George Floyd’s murder

Yale University has apologized for its association with slavery, following several years of research and study into its formative ties to the slave trade.

The Ivy League institution intensified its desire to confront its ties to slavery after the 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis — and now it has admitted that “this is a truth we must face.”

Yale has pledged to do better, including expanding their research partnerships with historically black colleges and universities across the country.

After a four-year research project, Yale released a statement saying, “We recognize our university’s historic role in and associations with slavery, as well as the labor, experiences, and contributions of enslaved people to the history of our university.

“We apologize for the ways in which Yale leaders participated in slavery throughout our early history.”

A view of Yale University’s central campus from Harkness Tower

The desire to confront racist legacies in the US gained momentum in 2020 after the death of George Floyd, a black man killed by a Minneapolis police officer

In recent years, a growing number of institutions have formally apologized for their historic role in the transatlantic slave trade.

Since October 2020, members of the Yale & Slavery Research Project have been investigating the New Haven, Connecticut-based university’s links to slavery and making their findings public.

“While there are no known records of Yale University owning enslaved people, many of Yale’s Puritan founders owned enslaved people, as did a significant number of early Yale leaders and other prominent members of the university community, and the Research Project has identified more than 200 of them. these enslaved people,” the statement said.

“Acknowledging and apologizing for this history are only part of the way forward,” the statement added.

The majority of those enslaved identify as black, but some identify as indigenous.

Some of the slaves participated in the construction of Connecticut Hall, the oldest building on campus. Others worked in cotton fields, rum refineries and other punishing places in Connecticut or elsewhere.

“Their grueling work benefited those who donated money to Yale,” the statement said.

Yale University has apologized for its connection to slavery following several years of research and study it says it undertook into its formative ties to the slave trade

“This project is an attempt to really look for that kind of truth, for ‘Truth and Light,’” said Yale President Peter Salovey.

‘Lux et Veritas, that is our motto. And sometimes truths are difficult, sometimes they are difficult. But this is a truth we must face.”

The project’s findings also revealed that prominent members of the Yale community joined with New Haven leaders and citizens to block a proposal to build a college for black youth in New Haven in 1831, which would have been America’s first black college .

School leaders say there will now be an ongoing commitment to repairing the damage of the past.

“Acknowledging and apologizing for this history are only part of the way forward,” the university said.

It plans to create new programs to fund the training of public school teachers in its hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, where the population is predominantly black.

Yale will also expand previously announced research partnerships with historically black colleges and universities across the country, with a “significant new investment” to be announced in the coming weeks.

Elihu Yale and family members sit at a table with tobacco pipes and wine glasses as an enslaved boy with a metal collar around his neck looks on

David W. Blight, the Yale historian who led the historical investigation, said the purpose of the effort was not “to throw ugly stones at anyone” but to present the university’s history honestly and fearlessly.

‘What this project shows, like others elsewhere, is that universities can actually do this. You can actually dig out your past, face it, write it down, make changes and get some measure of reward,” he said.

Yale’s connections to slavery are not a revelation. In 2001, in celebration of Yale’s 300th anniversary, a group of graduate students released an independent report on the school’s connections to slavery, highlighting the fact that many of its residential colleges were named after slave owners — but the effort was dismissed by some as a partisan hit.

The university began a reckoning over its connections later in 2017 when it changed its name from a residential college to honor a 19th-century alumnus and former U.S. vice president who was a staunch supporter of slavery.

The Ivy League university was renamed Calhoun College after pioneering computer scientist Grace Murray Hopper, a mathematician who earned a Yale degree in the 1930s, invented a groundbreaking computer programming language and became a rear admiral in the Navy.

A stained glass window depicting slaves at the formerly known Calhoun College at Yale. The college was renamed in 2017

The residential college was named after Calhoun when it was founded in the early 1930s, but has since been renamed

The controversy over the legacy of former Vice President John C. Calhoun had been simmering for years and boiled over with protests on campus in 2015.

A member of the Yale Class of 1804, Calhoun was a senator from South Carolina and a leading voice for those who opposed the abolition of slavery. From 1825 to 1832 he was vice president.

‘John C. Calhoun. White supremacist. Ardent defender of slavery as a positive good,” Salovey noted. “A person whose views hardened over the course of his life essentially died criticizing the Declaration of Independence and its insistence that all men be created equal.”

The residential college was named after Calhoun when it was founded in the early 1930s.

The college also removed a glass panel in the common room that showed a slave kneeling at Calhoun’s feet after a student campaign in 1992.

The name gained new attention as protesters on campuses across the country called on universities to address the legacy of historical figures such as Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University in New Jersey.

The former president was a supporter of segregationist policies. The Ivy League institution eventually removed his name from the school and also removed an “excessively festive” mural of Wilson from a campus dining hall.

Meanwhile, Harvard installed a plaque on campus in 2016 recognizing the slaves who worked at the school before the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts.