New Haven rejected plans for a black college in 1831. Generations later, it considers an apology

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

Instead, town’s free residents – white landowners with exclusive voting rights, lots of whom had ties to Yale College – rejected the plans by a vote of 700 to 4. Violence broke out in the next 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 assistance of city historian Michael Morand. It calls for an official apology and encourages city schools and Yale to supply educational programs concerning the events of 1831. Officials are considering holding a second public meeting on the proposal, and the complete Board of Alders is anticipated to take up the proposal later this fall.

However, Ficklin was unable to bring the proposal to fruition. He died suddenly at his home on October 9 on 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 certainly 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 this up where they left off and see it through to the end one way or another.”

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

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

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The apology debate began after Yale, which has been situated in New Haven because 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 lots of its founders and early leaders owned slaves, as did lots of its donors. Prominent members of the Yale community were a part of the opposition to the Black college.

Two years after the college’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 couldn’t be US residents. This decision was negated by constitutional changes introduced after the Civil War.

Cropper stated that the events of 1831 were a key early moment in the abolitionist movement, although the term “abolitionism” was not commonly used on the time. Plans for a black men’s college in New Haven were known throughout the country after they were approved by the primary 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, supporters of the Black University 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 town’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 many white supporters of the proposed college.

However, the day after the speech, town’s white mayor, Dennis Kimberly, a Yale graduate, published a notice that a meeting of town’s freemen could be held in two days to think about 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 Rebellion in Virginia, he made it to town. At least 55 white people died in the riot. Dozens of black people were killed in retaliation, and Turner was later executed. According to Yale researchers, the riot can 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 didn’t abolish slavery until 1848, the last 12 months to accomplish that in New England.

The pro-freedom resolutions against the college 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 could be “incompatible with the prosperity, if not the existence” of Yale and other schools in the realm, and “would be detrimental to the best interests of the city.”

After the vote, newspapers in the South applauded the motion of the freemen, wrote Morand, town’s historian, in a history of the events.

He noted that this decision did greater 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, founding father 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 college resulting from security concerns stemming from repeated harassment of her and her students by local residents, including setting fire to the college.

In 1837, Cheyney University of Pennsylvania became the primary black college or university in the nation. A 12 months later, Connecticut’s black law was repealed.