The Board of Alders, the legislative body for the city of New Haven, Connecticut , is considering making a formal apology for a vote that blocked the foundation of what would have been the first Black college in the U.S. Alder Tom Ficklin, a Democrat from New Haven’s Beaver Hills neighborhood, is sponsoring the initiative.
He hopes for the board to 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,” according to The Hartford Courant . The foundation of the college was voted out 700-4 at the time.
“Mayor Dennis Kimberly … took out an ad in the paper alerting property-owning white men to attend an emergency meeting to discuss the proposed college for young colored people,” Charles Warner Jr., who works as a historian of the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church and chairman of the Connecticut Freedom Trail , said.
The board of alders included several members with ties to Yale University at the time, including Rep. Ralph Isaacs Ingersoll and Connecticut’s Supreme Court chief justice David Daggett.
“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 added.
In 1831, a mayoral committee said a Black college would pose “unwarrantable and dangerous interference with the internal concerns of other States,” noting it would threaten slavery laws. It added that it would also hurt Yale University and that a Black institution would be “incompatible with the prosperity, if not the existence of the present institutions of learning,” The New Haven Independent reported.
Connecticut later passed a law prohibiting Black people from out of state to seek out an education in the state.
Ficklin noted that the foundation of a Black college would have had a significant impact on New Haven and a profound significance for the Black community.
“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.
“This was all about making sure that people had the opportunity to reach their full potential,” Ficklin added. “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.”
The board of alders their postponing their vote to allow for more people to attend future meetings. They also called for Yale University to offer reparations.
“Shame on the leaders of New Haven in 1831,” Fair Haven Alder Frank Redente, Jr. said, according to The New Haven Independent. “There seems to be an all-too-familiar player: Yale. … With the endowment that Yale has,” he argued, the university should provide more monetary resources to the city as compensation.
Local News
