Yale and Slavery: A History

by David W. Blight

A comprehensive look at how slavery and resistance to it have shaped Yale University   Award-winning historian David W. Blight, with the Yale and Slavery Research Project, answers the call to investigate Yale University’s historical involvement with slavery, the slave trade, and abolition. This narrative history demonstrates the importance of slavery in the making of this renowned American institution of higher learning.   Drawing on wide-ranging archival materials, Yale and Slavery extends from the century before the college’s founding in 1701 to the dedication of its Civil War memorial in 1915, while engaging with the legacies and remembrance of this complex story. The book brings into focus the enslaved and free Black people who have been part of Yale’s history from the beginning—but too often ignored in official accounts. These individuals and their descendants worked at Yale; petitioned and fought for freedom and dignity; built churches, schools, and antislavery organizations; and were among the first Black students to transform the university from the inside.   Always alive to the surprises and ironies of the past, Yale and Slavery presents a richer and more complete history of Yale, the third-oldest college in the country, showing how pillars of American higher education, even in New England, emerged over time intertwined with the national and international history of racial slavery.

Genres: Race, History, Nonfiction, American History

448 pages, Hardcover

Published February 16, 2024

About the author

David William Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the Pulitzer Prize and Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. In 2021, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Reviews

[James Steichen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a scrupulous and well documented study of how the history of Yale was affected by the institution of slavery and the role that its faculty and students played in shaping America’s debates over racial hierarchy.

Because the university was so closely bound up with state and national political and economic forces and leaders it also serves as a history of the state of Connecticut and shows how enslaved labor and other discriminatory systems were not isolated to the southern United States.

I did not attend Yale but still found the history compelling and it allowed me to rethink the role that universities play in both challenging and reproducing systems of inequality. For those who know the campus I am sure it would be even more illuminating as the book provides background on major figures in the school’s history and many of its iconic buildings and some that no longer exist.

Among other highlights I had no idea that the trial of the Amistad rebels took place in New Haven. I also had no idea of how widespread enslaved labor was in states such as Connecticut well into the 1800s. This book provides important testimony regarding the complicated reality of America’s history.