Yale School of Medicine launched its new lecture series, Perspectives for Inclusion, with a talk by Yale historian David Blight about his book, Yale and Slavery: A History. On September 24, 2024, Blight described his discussions with then-President Peter Salovey about launching the Yale and Slavery Research Project, the major historical events leading up to the university’s examination of its own past, the research process, and some of its striking discoveries.
Writing a New Chapter
The talk was followed by a panel discussion about ways that YSM departments are reckoning with this past, including a recent major initiative to strengthen Yale’s partnerships with HBCUs, one of the university’s commitments arising directly from the research project. Read more about the panel discussion.
Hiding in Plain Sight
Blight explained that the research began in the depths of the Covid lock-down, which delayed access to the manuscripts collections. “Most of this research ... came from Yale’s magnificent libraries ... Sterling and the Beinecke -- it has been hiding in plain sight for well over 200 years.“ He had appointed a working group of about a dozen faculty, staff, graduate students and postdocs, librarians “who were crucial,” and members of New Haven’s African American community who are “deeply involved” in the history of its churches and the town.
Blight said that, although Yale began writing about itself as an institution as far back as the 18th century, only recently did universities begin studying their own pasts in relation to the slave trade and other forms of exploitation. “The field of slavery studies – across the world – has reached an enormous maturation... A historiography has been developing over three generations. The scholarship had been done, but not about universities themselves.” Blight concluded that he had other research projects in the works and, “I wasn’t going to stop and do it either – until I was asked.”
A Point in History
The second reason for “why now,” according to Blight, is that we in the Western world ... have “been undergoing a kind of ‘memory boom’” – a fascination with how histories and commemoration have become contested and have evolved over time, “how after the end of empires, after the end of the Cold War... was a huge opening up of new histories. It was only a matter of time before the ‘memory boom’ hit universities at their core. What about your own story?” He explained, “We’ve been living through what we call ‘culture wars’, and ‘history wars,’” since the 1990s, “huge public fights about the past. ...The past has become a matter of public attention as never before.”
In recent years, over 100 universities have engaged in similar research, which Blight attributes to several major, traumatic events. “9/11 caused an internal reckoning – ‘Why do they hate us? ... What is this thing called America? ... What is our identity as a nation?’” Then came public attention to police shootings, the massacre in Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the rise of a neo-Confederacy, the Covid pandemic, and the worldwide George Floyd protest moment -- “another racial reckoning” -- and controversies about Confederate monuments.
He said, “Public interest caught up to what historians have been studying,” and in the summer of 2020, President Salovey, with the support of the Board of Trustees, reached out to Blight, calling up on him to launch the historical study. Blight replied that he did not wish to write a report that would sit on a shelf. “Let’s write a narrative history that real people might read.”
New Haven’s College
Blight gave a brief history of Yale’s founders and early presidents, and their ties to slavery, stating that in the early 1700s, it was very common for New England clergy to own slaves. He described the construction of Connecticut Hall, a massive undertaking by 22 men, 5 of whom were enslaved people, and 2 who were free Black men.
Those two free men were Jethro Luke and his son Gad, whose property is marked on a 1748 map of New Haven’s nine squares. The plot of land owned by Jethro and his wife, Mindwell, is now bordered by Yale Law School and Grove Street Cemetery.
A Study in Contradictions
Blight described the background and career of Benjamin Silliman, an early Yale graduate, and a brilliant geologist and chemist who founded the university’s first biological sciences in the 1800s. On the subject of slavery, Silliman was deeply contradictory. He was raised in one of the state’s largest slaveholding families. For his commencement from Yale, he read an anti-slavery poem which condemned slavery as “the uncured gangrene of an unreasoning mind.” He later took charge of his family’s farm, including the management of its enslaved laborers, and expressed both guilt and rationalizations for his role.
One of the many subjects Silliman studied was sugar production, spending almost two years in Louisiana, and in correspondence with a fellow chemist, he wrote, “Open your eyes and ears to every fact connected with the actual condition of slavery everywhere—but do not talk about it—hear and see everything but say little.” Blight made this quote the epigraph of the book.
The Sub-Professor
Blight closed on the topic of Silliman’s assistant, Robert Park, a free Black man, who Silliman called a “sub-professor.” Park went on the lecture circuit with Silliman and assisted with experiments. In addition to this “day job,” Park had a significant public life, founding a church that still exists in New Haven; contributing to the Black Conventions Movement; and advocating for abolition, suffrage, and increased access to education. Blight remarked, “Robert Park will live long enough to pull the cord on that monument [to Silliman] up on Science Hill. And he will live long enough to see one of his grandsons graduate from Yale. ... There is a progress story there, if you need one, in a book and a story that doesn’t always show us progress.”