Yale issues formal apology for its connections to slavery
Yale University has issued a formal apology over its connections to slavery – and announced a series of initiatives based on a research project about its shameful history.
The Ivy League school announced the release of “Yale and Slavery: A History,” published by Yale University Press and written by Professor David W. Blight, with the Yale and Slavery Research Project.
“Today, on behalf of Yale University, we recognize our university’s historical role in and associations with slavery, as well as the labor, the experiences, and the contributions of enslaved people to our university’s history, and we apologize for the ways that Yale’s leaders, over the course of our early history, participated in slavery,” the school said in a statement Friday.
“Acknowledging and apologizing for this history are only part of the path forward. These findings have propelled us toward meaningful action to address the continued effects of slavery in society today,” it added in the Friday release.
“Although 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 Yale’s early leaders and other prominent members of the university community,” it said.
The project has identified more than 200 of the enslaved people, the school said in the statement, which was signed by President Peter Salovey and Yale Corporation senior trustee Josh Bekenstein.
“The majority of those who were enslaved are identified as Black, but some are identified as Indigenous. Some of those enslaved participated in the construction of Connecticut Hall, the oldest building on campus,” according to the statement.
The effort to examine Yale’s role in slavery was launched in 2020 in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and calls for a nationwide reckoning about racial injustice.
The school also announced a variety of initiatives to address the residual effects of that period in American history, ranging from economic support to educational outreach and fellowships.
Several other colleges and universities have undertaken similar measures, including Harvard, Brown and Princeton.
In 2022, Harvard allocated $100 million to research and redress its “extensive entanglements with slavery,” President Lawrence Bacow said, CNN reported.
In 2021, students at Brown voted to support reparations for descendants of enslaved people – a decade after the school issued a report on its own ties to slavery.
And in 2020, Princeton voted to remove the name of President Woodrow Wilson from its school of public policy and a residential college, citing his “racist thinking and policies.”
