Connecticut city considers issuing apology for denying black college plans two centuries ago

In 1831, a coalition of Black leaders and white abolitionists proposed the nation's first African American college in New Haven, Connecticut, in an attempt to open a door to education that was largely shut in a time of slavery.

Instead, the city’s freemen — white male landowners with the sole authority to vote, many with ties to Yale College — rejected the plans on a vote of 700-4. Violence erupted in following months, with attacks on Black residents, their homes and the properties of their white supporters.

Now, 193 years later, New Haven’s leaders are considering a public apology for the harm that was done when their predecessors scuttled the plans.

City Alder Thomas Ficklin Jr., a Democrat, submitted a 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 on 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 it up later this fall.

Ficklin, however, wasn't able to see the proposal to fruition. He died suddenly at his home on Oct. 9 at the age of 75, several weeks 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.”

His wife, Julia Ficklin, said the resolution was one of the last things on his desk at home.

“I do know that it was very important to him,” she said in 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."

Morand vowed to continue Ficklin's work and said alders will move the resolution forward toward a vote.

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

The debate over an apology comes after Yale, which has been in New Haven since the early 1700s, formally apologized for its ties to slavery in February. A research project by the Ivy League school determined that many of its founders and early leaders owned slaves, as did many donors. Prominent members of the Yale community were part of the opposition to the Black college.

Two years after the 1831 rejection, state legislators passed what was called the “Black Law,” making it illegal to run a school to educate out-of-state Black people. That law was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 Dred Scott ruling, which said African Americans could not be U.S. citizens. That decision was negated by constitutional amendments passed after the Civil War.

The events of 1831 were a key early moment in the abolitionist movement, Cropper said, although the term “abolition” was not widely used at the time. Plans for the college for Black men in New Haven were known around the country after they were endorsed by the first Convention of the Free People of Color in Philadelphia and reported by abolitionist publications, he said.

"This is really like a turning point, indeed," Cropper said.

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By summer 1831, supporters of the Black college had concrete plans. A site in New Haven was chosen where the interchange of interstates 95 and 91 now sits. A funding plan called for $10,000 in donations from white supporters and $10,000 from Black supporters.

In early September, Simeon Jocelyn, a white pastor of a Black congregation in the city, spoke at the church about improving the lives of Black people. He and William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of an abolitionist newspaper in Boston, were among white supporters of the proposed college.

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

Around the time of Jocelyn's speech at the church, the news of Nat Turner's violent slave rebellion in Virginia had reached the city. At least 55 white people were killed in the rebellion. Scores of Black people were killed in retribution, and Turner was later executed. According to Yale researchers, the rebellion may have played a role in the white freemen's opposition to the college.

At the time, slavery was still legal in Connecticut but not widespread. The state wouldn't abolish slavery until 1848, the last in New England to do so.

The freemen's resolutions against the school said the immediate emancipation of slaves in some states was “an unwarrantable and dangerous interference with the internal concerns of other States, and ought to be discouraged.” They also said a Black college would be “incompatible with the prosperity, if not the existence of” Yale and other schools in the area and “destructive of the best interests of the city.”

After the vote, newspapers in the South applauded the freemen's action, Morand, the city historian, wrote in a history of the events.

The decision didn't just close off Black educational opportunities, he noted. It sent a nationwide message "reinforcing the status quo of slavery and racial oppression.”

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

Crandall's conviction was later overturned, but she closed her school because of safety concerns from repeated harassment of her and her students by local residents, including an arson at the school.

In 1837, Cheyney University of Pennsylvania became the country’s first Black college or university. A year later, Connecticut's Black Law was repealed.