Yale and Slavery

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 extensive archival materials, Yale and Slavery traces the story from the century before the college's founding in 1701 to the dedication of its Civil War memorial in 1915, while engaging with contemporary debates over naming and memorialization. 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 or excluded from official histories. 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 fourth-oldest college in the country, showing how pillars of American higher education, even in New England, were built by both enslavers and the enslaved.