Leaders for the city of New Haven, Connecticut, are asking the town to consider a formal apology for refusing to establish the first Black institution of higher learning for Black men in 1831.
According to Fox 61, in August, City Alder Thomas Ficklin Jr., a Democrat, submitted a proposal with help from City Historian Michael Morand.
The proposal requests a formal apology for the city’s inaction, which was followed by violent attacks on New Haven’s Black residents, their homes, and the homes of white abolitionists.
The proposal also calls for Yale University, known as Yale College in 1831, and New Haven’s city schools to provide educational programs regarding the eruption of violence after the city’s white male landowners voted 700-4 against creating the nation’s first university for Black men.
Officials are considering a second public meeting on Ficklin’s proposal, although he died suddenly in October, shortly after an interview with The Associated Press.
“My political ancestors were involved with this,” Ficklin told the AP. “Now we have a chance to kind of render our opinion not only on their actions, on our ancestors’ actions but how are we going to be judged in the future.”
Ficklin’s widow, Julia Ficklin, told Fox 61 that the proposal was of the utmost importance to her husband before his sudden death.
“I do know that it was very important to him,” she told the outlet via a phone interview. “And one of my prayers these last couple days as I’m grieving is that someone will step up and pick up where he left off with it and see it through, one way or another.”
The debate was ignited in earnest once Yale issued a formal apology for its ties to slavery in February, and a research project from the university uncovered that many of its founders, early leaders, and donors were enslavers.
Among those who expressed opposition to the creation of the city’s proposed Black college were prominent members of the Yale University community.
According to researchers, Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia may have contributed to the white men’s rejection of the planned college, which had support from William Lloyd Garrison, the white publisher of Boston’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator.
In 1831, slavery was still legal in Connecticut, although the practice was not as widespread as it once had been. In 1848, it became the last of the New England states to abolish slavery.
However, according to a resolution against the Black college, the emancipation of the enslaved would create “an unwarrantable and dangerous interference with the internal concerns of other States, and ought to be discouraged.”
The white freemen also warned that a school for Black men was “incompatible with the prosperity, if not the existence of” Yale and the other white universities in the area, as well as “destructive of the best interests of the city.”
According to Morand, the choice of the white freemen had the effect of “reinforcing the status quo of slavery and racial oppression.” Indeed, their decision was celebrated by many newspapers in the South, all enslaver-friendly states.
In Connecticut, well before the South would institute the Black Codes or Black Laws, they had their own version, popularly referred to as the Black Law, which forbade Black people from outside of Connecticut from getting an education in Connecticut without the permission of individual towns in the state.
The founder of Yale Law School, David Daggett, a Connecticut state judge who presided over the trial of Prudence Crandall, a Black woman who was teaching elementary education to Black girls in Canterbury, ruled that since Black people were not citizens, they, therefore, had no rights to education.
Crandall eventually closed the school after a white mob broke into the school, ransacked it, and terrorized the students with clubs and iron bars.
As Yale University’s Community Engagement Program Manager Tubyez Cropper said in a press release for a 2023 documentary which examines New Haven’s failure, “The question ‘what could have been?’ Genuinely makes you think about what New Haven and the United States could have been like if a historic decision such as the creation of a Black college were approved,” Cropper said. “What would relations have been like between Yale and this college, and what impactful Black figures that we know of today would have attended the college?”
Cropper continued, “It took valiant Black leaders, like Bias Stanley and Scipio Augustus, along with the courageous abolition mindset of white leaders like Simeon Jocelyn and William Lloyd Garrison to make such an impact on the way the nation progressed. History is so important because acknowledging the past helps us understand the multitude of perspectives that make up this world.”
He concluded, “By understanding the stepping stones that were put in place, at a time where it seemed almost impossible, we can prevent similar things from reoccurring.”
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