A CT city said no to a Black college. Nearly 200 years later, a city leader wants to apologize.

Almost 200 years after a Connecticut city fathers quashed the founding of a college for Black students , an alder has proposed that the city formally apologize for keeping “the doors to educational opportunity” closed to its African-American students.

Alder Tom Ficklin, a Democrat from the Beaver Hills neighborhood of New Haven, sponsored the resolution, supported by City Historian Michael Morand , which is before the alders’ Education and Health and Human Services committees .

It resolves that the alders apologize “for the great harm that was done to Black Americans when City leaders and New Haven voters came together to oppose the college of 1831.”

Ficklin said he proposed the resolution because the alders “have a role in New Haven to represent civic, mental, spiritual, social life. We’re not just a legislative body. We’re a body that is in tune with our residents’ and constituents’ concerns.”

The college would have been the first in the country for Black men. The story was told in a documentary by Morand, director of community engagement at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and Tubyez Cropper, manager of community engagement.

It’s also told in a chapter by Morand in Yale professor David Blight’s recent book Yale and Slavery: A History , which is available as a free download. Morand was not available for comment Monday.

Simeon Jocelyn, a white minister of a Black church, had written to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and Black leaders such as the Rev. Richard Allen in Philadelphia, seeking support for the college.

However, when the idea came up for a vote, it lost by 700-4.

“Mayor Dennis Kimberly … had an ad taken out in the paper alerting freemen, and that was property-owning white men, to appear for an emergency meeting dealing with this idea for a college that was to service young colored people,” said Charles Warner Jr., historian of the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church and chairman of the Connecticut Freedom Trail . He also narrated the documentary.

“And the main architects of doing away with the idea were people who were serving in various levels of government, not just New Haven city government,” Warner said.

They included David Daggett, a former mayor who would become chief justice of the state Supreme Court, and Ralph Isaacs Ingersoll, who was a U.S. congressman. Many had ties to Yale University.

He said it makes sense for the city’s legislative body to apologize for killing the idea of the college.

“If government officials were the vehicle to put the death knell formally to the idea, then it makes sense that government would then also acknowledge their part, and at the very least own their part, lift the story up, so that the public can be aware of the story, and then do a very simple human act of apologizing,” Warner said.

After slavery, Black CT residents took to the newspaper to put their families back together

Ficklin said it’s important to remember history and that it still has a hold on the present.

“My feeling is that history is evolving. The past is never the past,” Ficklin said. “The past is always the present, and particularly these days and times in 2024 … we can see how narratives or an ideology are fracturing society.

“I’m of the opinion that reconciliation, i.e., the South African movement, truth and reconciliation, is still super-imperative like never before,” he said.

Warner also said history can help lead us into the future.

“We read the future by the past,” he said. “And that’s a quote from the Rev. Alexander Crummell, who was an early Black Yale student and minister. If we look at the present condition of politics, public service, general society, there’s clearly still a need to talk about the idea of justice and equality and the dangers of man’s inhumanity to man.

“So simply sharing the story makes people aware, but it also gives people signposts, if you will, to be able to see what’s up ahead if we’re continuing with certain behaviors,” Warner said.

He said New Haven would be a different place if the college had been founded.

“It would have had almost 200 years of an institution of higher learning dedicated to training the minds and the hands of Black citizens, and not only just certainly Black people living in New Haven, but it would have been a beacon that drew on the hopes and the interests and the talents of Black people, certainly from across the country, but throughout the diaspora.”

He said the plan was to draw Black men from the South, the Caribbean and Africa.

“This was all about making sure that people had the opportunity to reach their full potential,” he said. “You can’t castigate and talk badly against people who were never given a full opportunity to develop their fullest potential. And so behavior would be different, because there would be an established history of higher education, a long history of a major institution operating.”

Warner said the college also would have generated Black-owned businesses, restaurants “and the like that go with sustaining a sizable and thriving population.”

Ed Stannard can be reached at estannard@courant.com .