New Haven rejected plans to create a black college in 1831. Generations later, it considers an apology – Boston News, weather, sports

In 1831, a coalition of black leaders and white abolitionists proposed the creation of the nation’s first African-American college in New Haven, Conntrying to open doors to education that were largely closed during the days of slavery.

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

Now, 193 years later, New Haven’s leaders are considering a public apology for the damage done when their predecessors thwarted their plans.

Democrat City Alder Thomas Ficklin Jr. he submitted the 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 Board of Alders is expected to take up the proposal later this fall.

Ficklin, however, was unable to bring the proposal to fruition. He died suddenly at his home on October 9 at the age of 75, a few weeks after his interview with the Associated Press.

“My political ancestors were involved in this,” Ficklin told the AP. “Now we have a chance to express our opinion not only about their actions, the actions of our ancestors, but also about 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 know it was very important to him,” she said in a telephone interview. “And one of my prayers over the last few days as I grieve is for someone to step in and pick it up where they left off and see it through to the end one way or another.”

Morand promised to continue Ficklin’s work and said the Alders would bring the resolution to a vote.

Interest in the city’s rejection of the Black college was renewed two years ago when Morand and Tubyez Cropper, who both work at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, published a book short documentary film about it.

The apology debate began after Yale, which has been located in New Haven since the early 18th century, issued a formal apology in February for its ties to slavery. A research project conducted by the Ivy League school found that many of its founders and early leaders owned slaves, as did many of its donors. Prominent members of the Yale community were part of the opposition to the Black college.

Two years after the school’s rejection in 1831, state legislators passed the so-called “Black Law,” making it illegal to operate a school educating out-of-state blacks. This law was cited in an infamous 1857 U.S. Supreme Court decision The Dred Scott Judgmentwhich stated that African Americans could not be US citizens. This decision was negated by constitutional changes introduced after the Civil War.

Cropper stated that the events of 1831 were a pivotal moment in the abolitionist movement, although the term “abolitionism” was not commonly used at the time. Plans for a black men’s college in New Haven were known throughout the country after they were approved by the first Philadelphia Convention of Free Colored Men and announced in abolitionist publications, he said.

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

By the summer of 1831, black college supporters already had specific plans. The location chosen was New Haven, where Interstates 95 and 91 are today. The funding plan called for $10,000 in donations from white supporters and $10,000 from black supporters.

In early September, Simeon Jocelyn, the white pastor of the city’s Black congregation, 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.

However, the day after the speech, the city’s white mayor, Dennis Kimberly, a Yale graduate, published a notice that a meeting of the city’s freemen would be held in two days to consider the proposed college. It was at this meeting that the university was rejected.

About the time of Jocelyn’s speech, news of Fr Nat Turner’s Brutal Slave Revolt in Virginia he made it to town. At least 55 white people died in the rebellion. Dozens of black people were killed in retaliation, and Turner was later executed. According to Yale researchers, the rebellion may have played a role in free white people’s opposition to the university.

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

The pro-freedom resolutions against the school stated that the immediate emancipation of slaves in some states constituted “an unreasonable and dangerous interference in the internal affairs of other states and should be discouraged.” They also said that establishing a black college would be “incompatible with the prosperity, if not the existence” of Yale and other schools in the area, and “would be detrimental to the best interests of the city.”

After the vote, newspapers in the south applauded the action of the free people, wrote Morand, the city historian, in a history of the events.

He noted that this decision did more than just cut off educational opportunities for blacks. He sent a nationwide signal “reinforcing the status quo of slavery and racial oppression.”

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

Crandall’s sentence was later overturned, but she closed the school due to security concerns stemming from repeated harassment of her and her students by local residents, including setting fire to the school.

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