New Haven rejected plans for a black university in 1831. Generations later, it considered an apology

On By Pranco

In 1831, a coalition of black leaders and white abolitionists proposed the nation’s first African American college in New Haven, Connecticut, in an effort to open a door to education that had been largely closed during a time of slavery.

Instead, the city’s free men—white male landowners with sole voting rights, many with ties to Yale College—rejected the plans by a vote of 700 to 4. Violence broke out in the following months, with attacks on black residents, their homes and the property of their white supporters.

Now, 193 years later, New Haven leaders are considering a public apology for the damage caused when their predecessors foiled the plans.

City Councilman Thomas Ficklin Jr., a Democrat, introduced a proposed resolution in August with the help of city historian Michael Morand. It calls for an official apology and encourages city schools and Yale to offer educational programs about the events of 1831. Officials are considering holding a second public meeting on the proposal, and the full Council of Alders is expected to consider it later this fall take hand.

However, Ficklin was unable to make the proposal a reality. He died suddenly at his home on October 9 at the age of 75, several weeks after an interview with The Associated Press.

City Councilman Thomas Ficklin Jr., who died suddenly at his home on Oct. 9 at the age of 75, poses Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024, where a site for the nation's first African-American college was proposed in 1831, in New York. Haven, Conn. (Jessica Hill/AP)
City Councilman Thomas Ficklin Jr., who died suddenly at his home on Oct. 9 at the age of 75, poses Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024, where a site for the nation’s first African-American college was proposed in 1831, in New York. Haven, Conn. (Jessica Hill/AP)

“My political ancestors were involved in this,” Ficklin told the AP. “Now we have the opportunity to give our opinion not only on their actions, but also on the actions of our ancestors, but also on how we will be judged in the future.”

His wife, Julia Ficklin, said the resolution was one of the last things on his desk at home.

“I do know it was very important to him,” she said in a telephone interview. “And one of my prayers these last few days as I grieve is that someone will step up and pick up where they left off and see it through somehow.”

Morand pledged to continue Ficklin’s work and said Alders will move the resolution toward a vote.

Interest in the city’s rejection of the Black College was reignited two years ago, when Morand and Tubyez Cropper, both of whom work at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, released their publication. a short video documentary about it.

Tubyez Cropper, left, and Michael Morand, pose at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024, in New Haven, Conn. (Jessica Hill/AP)
Tubyez Cropper, left, and Michael Morand, pose at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024, in New Haven, Conn. (Jessica Hill/AP)

The debate over an apology comes after Yale, which has been in New Haven since the early 1700s, formally apologized for its ties to slavery in February. An Ivy League school research project determined that many of the founders and early leaders owned slaves, as did many donors. Prominent members of the Yale community were part of the opposition to the Black College.

Two years after its repudiation in 1831, state lawmakers passed the so-called “Black Act,” making it illegal to operate a school to educate black people from out of state. That law was cited in the infamous 1857 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Dred Scott pronunciationwhich stated that African Americans could not be U.S. citizens. That decision was overturned by constitutional amendments passed after the Civil War.

The events of 1831 were an important early moment in the abolitionist movement, Cropper said, although the term “abolition” was not commonly used at the time. Plans for the college for black men in New Haven were known nationwide after they were approved by the first Convention of the Free People of Color in Philadelphia and reported in abolitionist publications, he said.

“This is indeed a turning point,” Cropper said.

In the summer of 1831, supporters of the Black College had concrete plans. A location in New Haven was chosen where the intersection of highways 95 and 91 is now located. A funding plan called for $10,000 in donations from white supporters and $10,000 from black supporters.

In early September, Simeon Jocelyn, a white pastor of a black congregation in the city, spoke at church about improving the lives of black people. He and William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of an abolitionist newspaper in Boston, were among the white supporters of the proposed college.

A highway overpass and an empty parking lot mark the site proposed in 1831 for the nation's first African-American college in New Haven, Conn. (Jessica Hill/AP)
A highway overpass and an empty parking lot mark the site proposed in 1831 for the nation’s first African-American college in New Haven, Conn. (Jessica Hill/AP)

However, a day after the speech, the city’s white mayor, Dennis Kimberly, a Yale graduate, published a notice that a meeting of the city’s free men would take place in two days to discuss the proposed college. It was at that meeting that the council was rejected.

Around the time of Jocelyn’s talk at church, the news of Nat Turner’s Violent Slave Revolt had reached the city in Virginia. At least 55 whites were killed in the uprising. Dozens of black people were killed in retaliation and Turner was later executed. According to Yale researchers, the uprising may have played a role in white free men’s resistance to the college.

At the time, slavery was still legal in Connecticut, but not widespread. The state would not abolish slavery until 1848, the last in New England to do so.

The resolutions of the free men against the school stated that the immediate emancipation of slaves in some states was “an unjustified and dangerous interference with the internal interests of other states, and should be discouraged.” They also said that a black college would be “incompatible with the prosperity, if not the existence, of” Yale and other schools in the area and would be “destructive to the interests of the city.”

After the vote, newspapers in the South applauded the freemen’s action, Morand, the city historian, wrote in a history of the events.

The decision didn’t just close off educational opportunities for Black people, he noted. It sent a national message “reinforcing the status quo of slavery and racial oppression.”

A key player in the opposition to the New Haven college was David Daggett, founder of Yale Law School and former US senator. Daggett was also a state judge in Connecticut who presided over a trial in 1833 that led to the conviction of Prudence Crandall, who was officially designated by the legislature as the state’s heroine in 1995, for running a school for black girls in Canterbury , contrary to the law. the black law of the state.

Crandall’s conviction was later overturned, but she closed her school due to safety concerns from repeated harassment of her and her students by local residents, including arson at the school.

In 1837, Cheyney University of Pennsylvania became the nation’s first black college or university. A year later, Connecticut’s Black Law was repealed.