A Response to the Yale and Slavery Research Project
Beloved Community,
On February 16, Yale University released the findings of the Yale and Slavery Research Project, which the University initiated in 2020. Some significant findings of the Project, which were highlighted in a live-stream event include:
Many of Yale’s founders and early leaders enslaved people, some of whom worked to build Connecticut Hall, which is the oldest building on campus. The Project identified over 200 Black and Indigenous enslaved people who were connected to early leaders of Yale.
In 1831, Yale faculty and leaders successfully stopped the creation of a college for Black youth in New Haven, which would have been the first Black college in the country.
I have thought many times in the last few days about the enslaved people we now know helped build Yale University, how they labored in horrific and dehumanizing bondage to help construct one of the wealthiest educational institutions in the world. I have wondered about their descendants and how the legacy of slavery has shaped their lives, as it has shaped my own. I have asked myself, what would New Haven be like if it were home not just to Yale, but to the nation’s first Black college? How would your neighborhood be different if leaders at Yale had not succeeded in their mission to legitimize slavery and segregation all those years ago? How would your life be different if Yale truly paid its fair share to our city now?
Like so many Black families in New Haven, mine arrived here from the south seeking opportunity and a better quality of life. My family fled a sharecropping system in North Carolina that itself was barely one step removed from slavery. In North Carolina, we lived in shanty houses and worked in the tobacco fields of the white landowner who leased out parcels of land to families like mine. No matter how hard my parents worked, they never broke even. They could only see a future where we remained trapped in a cycle of backbreaking labor and debt.
After hearing about better paying manufacturing jobs in the north, my father left North Carolina in the early 1960s to try and find work and build a better life for his family. He arrived in New Haven and was almost immediately hired to do construction. My mother, my siblings, and I soon followed.
My father worked in construction and later for many decades as a custodian in the operating rooms at what is now Yale-New Haven Hospital. It was better than sharecropping, but he still had to work more than 80 hours a week at multiple jobs to support our family. Even in the 1990s, I remember hearing about the mostly Black men like my father who would line up by the dumpsters and loading docks at Yale desperate to get hired for even one day. Opportunity in New Haven was, as it still is, constrained by segregated development, racial inequality, and economic struggle.
It is still the case that the average life expectancy in Newhallville is over a decade shorter than in Prospect Hill, even though they are only blocks away and in spite of decades-long promises that Science Park would provide better employment opportunities for Newhallville and Dixwell. The same neighborhoods that were redlined in the 1930s are still the parts of our city with the highest levels of unemployment, evictions, and homicides.
As our city grows many of us—working people, poor people, Black and Brown people—rightfully worry that there will be no place for us in New Haven. Gentrification, rising rents, and mega-landlords are pushing families out of their homes and neighborhoods. Large institutions like Yale University and Yale-New Haven Hospital continue to prosper, but there are still far too many children in our city who go hungry, far too many people who are one medical bill away from losing everything, far too many parents not sure how they will make ends meet this month. Too many of us work low-wage, insecure jobs that offer no hope of stability and security for ourselves, our families, and our futures.
Over the past ten years, New Haven Rising has helped push for and win hiring pathways at Yale for New Haven residents to have stable, union jobs. We have stood side-by-side with workers at Yale and in New Haven’s hospitality industry as they have unionized their workplaces and won contracts with industry-leading pay and benefits. We have fought for and won over $50 million in additional revenue from Yale for our city. We have been guided by a belief in the power of ordinary, working people to unite in the struggle for racial and economic justice and to win.
As a movement we have called attention to Yale University’s investments in businesses operating in apartheid South Africa, private prisons, fossil fuel extraction and development, and sovereign debt in Argentina and Puerto Rico. In many cases, Yale has changed investment policies after students, workers and community members called attention to these issues. We must continue to hold Yale accountable in its investment policies and other actions as the University grapples with its history on slavery and race.
This report is a reminder that while our victories have been hard-won, they are not enough. In 2021, Yale made a historic increase to its voluntary contribution to New Haven. But our city still loses about $100 million in tax revenue due to tax-exemptions for properties owned by Yale University and Yale New Haven Hospital every year, and Yale’s leaders have not committed to continuing their contribution after 2027. In fact, Yale’s voluntary contribution is currently slated to decrease by $8 million in 2027. This lost revenue is money we don’t have for our schools, for youth and senior services, and for affordable housing. As the leaders of Yale reckon with the University’s past, they must also reckon with its impact in the present.
We invite you to join us at an Area Build meeting in your neighborhood to discuss what Yale’s legacy of slavery has meant for New Haven and how we can organize for a better future in our communities. You can RSVP by emailing us at info@newhavenrising.org to get more information and get involved.
In solidarity,
Rev. Scott Marks
You can download the findings of the project in the form of a book, Yale & Slavery: A History here.
You can also read a 2001 report on Yale and slavery written by researchers from Local 34 and the Graduate Employee Student Organization, which is now Local 33, here.
