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Recent Headlines

Dwights and Wrongs
(New Haven Advocate, Letter to the Editor, 1/24/02)
I was surprised to see Dr. Robert Forbes making historical errors [The Trial of Timothy Dwight]. Theodore Dwight's anti-slavery activism did not occur after his brother Timothy Dwight's death.

Slavery Under The Elms
(Northeast Magazine, Hartford Courant, 1/20/02)

A Report Linking Yale's Past To Human Bondage Has Been Sitting Quietly On The University's Doorstep Since The Summer. Some Who Feel Black Americans Are Owed A Debt Want It Picked Up.
An in-depth article about the report and its reception.

For some, Dr. King's words favor reparations
(Yale Daily News, 1/21/02)
Two days before the national holiday celebrating his birth, the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. filled the Community Baptist Church: "It's all right to tell a man to lift himself up by his bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to a bootless man that he should lift himself up by his bootstraps."

'Paragon of peace' would fight for slavery reparations
(New Haven Register, Op-Ed by Rev. Eric Smith)
What would the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. say about reparations for slavery?

The Trial of Timothy Dwight
Was a Yale president an abolitionist--or slave-owning sell-out?

(New Haven Advocate, 12/27/01)
He blasted slavery around the world. He also purchased a slave. But he said he never intended her to be a slave. But he also intended to keep her in his servitude.
Letter to the Editor: Dwights and Wrongs

Taking a closer look at the slavery report
(Yale Daily News, masthead editorial, 12/12/01)

When three Yale doctoral candidates published "Yale, Slavery and Abolition," a strongly worded essay intended to uncover Yale's sordid and tangled past relationship with slavery, an alarmed campus reacted immediately. But amid the cyclone of calls ... few took the time simply to question the accuracy and motives of the report.
LTE: Slavery report's contents, not authors, deserve discussion
LTE:
Slavery report's legitimacy independent of authors' political views
Column: Critics of Yale Slavery report wrong

Yale slavery report questioned by experts
Lack of historical context, financial support from unions cited

(Yale Daily News, 12/12/01)
It was August, the slowest month of the year for news, when the controversy broke.

The Slavery Legacy
(Yale Alumni Magazine, Letter to the Editor, November)
My response to the Amistad group [See "Light & Verity," Oct.] , as a Yale graduate of many years ago, as an historian of sorts, as a teacher, and as someone interested in truth, is to applaud its members for drawing attention to the extent to which slavery and slave money once permeated American economy and culture. Each year, my students are astounded to learn that slavery existed here in "liberal" New England well into the 1800s; the Yale information provides further factual underpinnings for this assertion.

Dwight Hall plaque will not placate
(New Haven Register, 11/25/01)
Keeping Dwight Dwight is understandable when considering the rationale of Yale students at Dwight Hall. To change the name because its namesake, Timothy Dwight, was not just a Yale president but, according to all accounts, a defender of slavery, a trainer of pro-slavery theologians, and a slave owner to boot would lead to such undesirable repercussions as É The Black Domino Theory.

Dwight Hall plaque an unnecessary response
(Yale Daily News, 11/13/01, masthead editorial)
While the cabinet's unanimous decision to retain the name Dwight Hall was a wise one, the compromise solution revealed Sunday night remains problematic.
Letter to the Editor in response:
Rededication not the same as an apology
Dwight's Support of slavery deserves a response
Dwight Hall plaque a waste of time

Dwight Hall still making amends
(Yale Daily News, 11/12/01)
After a unanimous decision by the Dwight Hall Cabinet more than two weeks ago to keep its name, Dwight Hall took a step Friday to close wounds left by slavery. Dwight Hall co-coordinators Jessica Bulman '02 and Alan Schoenfeld '02 unveiled a plaque that acknowledged the pro-slavery practices of Dwight Hall's namesake, Timothy Dwight

Yalies reject activists' call
(New Haven Register, 11/10/01)
Yale students at Dwight Hall distanced themselves from their pro-slavery namesake Friday by unveiling a plaque that denounces his connection to the slave trade in America. But concerned about keeping their name recognition across the nation, the students rejected demands by activists to rename the building.

Yalies balk at name change
(New Haven Register, 11/9/01)
Students at Yale's Dwight Hall today will unveil a plaque praising the struggle for racial equality, but they will not change the facility's name, despite a request by a community reparations group.

When will Yale face up to its shameful past in support of slavery?
(Yale Daily News, 11/7/01)
Upon returning to campus, I expected to find debate on the question of Yale's legacy of slavery. The discussion did begin, but was quickly set aside in the wake of the events of Sept. 11. Now is the time for us to return our attention to this important question.

L’université des Bush reconnaît son passé esclavagiste (Granma international, 10/30/01)
LA très célèbre Université de Yale, située à New Haven, dans l’Etat nord-américain du Connecticut, a été obligée de reconnaître son passé esclavagiste.

Dwight Hall rejects proposal to change name
(Yale Daily News, 10/24/01)
Overcoming fears that its name might undermine its mission, the Dwight Hall Cabinet unanimously decided against a name change Tuesday night during its annual Executive Committee elections.

What's in a name? Dwight Hall and slavery
(Yale Daily News, masthead editorial, 10/4/01)
When the Dwight Hall cabinet reconvenes next Tuesday to debate a potential change in the institution's name, its members should remember that a rash decision could have disastrous consequences for the already understaffed, underfunded public service organization.

Wary of slave past, Dwight Hall mulls name change
Report says Timothy Dwight owned a slave; service organization's cabinet tables discussion
(Yale Daily News, 9/26/01)
In the wake of a report issued over the summer detailing Yale's history with slavery, members of the Dwight Hall Cabinet convened yesterday to discuss the possible changing of their organization's name.

A controversial report fuels demands that the University address its tainted past
(Yale Herald, 9/22/01)
Less than a rally but more than a lecture, the Fri., Sept. 7, town meeting entitled "Yale, Slavery, and Abolition: The Impact on Education Then and Now" was a first step, a feeling-out. A first step for a group of New HavenitesÑ grad students, local clergy, political activists, unionized workersÑwho feel compelled to make Yale take its own steps toward reparations.

City residents demand Yale pay reparations
(Yale Daily News, 9/10/01)
New Haven residents gathered at the Center Church on the Green Friday night to commemorate the 170th anniversary of attempts to form a black college and to draw continued attention to Yale's involvement with slavery. Clergy and community activists demanded reparations from the University.

SINS OF THE PAST
Artists' project is a silent protest of colonial-era racism

(New Haven Register, 9/9/01)
Two artists are planning to use New Haven's racial history in colonial times for an exhibit Ñ entitled "Silence" Ñ to get people talking about race relations in the 21st century.

City's oldest church offers apologies to blacks
(New Haven Register, front page, 9/8/01)
The oldest religious congregation in New Haven on Friday reached out to an equally historic church with common ancestry in an effort to heal a wound of nearly two centuries. The United Church of Christ at Center Church on the Green, was the site of a town meeting ...


Event

September 7th: Town Meeting
Yale, Slavery and Abolition:
The Impact on Education Then & Now

On September 7, 1831, Simeon Jocelyn stood in Center Church and proposed founding a black college in New Haven--what would have been the country's first.
On the 170th anniversary of that date, New Haven held a Town Meeting: Sept. 7, 6:00pm, in Center Church on the Green, New Haven. We were joined by a special guest: Prof. Gerald Horne from the University of North Carolina.


More Headlines

Reparation Yale und die Sklaverei
(Frankfurter Rundschau, 9/4/01)
Die amerikanische Eliteuniversitaet Yale kann auf vieles stolz sein. Zum Beispiel darauf, dass die 300 Jahre alte Institution den ersten Lehrstuhl einrichtete, der sich mit der Geschichte der Sklaverei befasste.

Report: Yale colleges named after slave holders
(Yale Daily News, 9/5/01)
An essay written by three Yale doctoral candidates has sparked a debate about the role Yale figures played in the slavery and abolitionist movements centuries ago.

"Like It Is" with Gil Noble
(WABC, Channel 7 New York, 9/2/01 from 12-1pm)
A one-hour panel discussion of slavery's legacy and Yale University, with Gil Noble, Rev. Eric Smith (Cmty Baptist Church), Kurt Schmoke (Sr. Fellow of Yale Corporation), and Antony Dugdale (one of the authors of the essay).

Reparations debates at Ivy League schools
(National Public Radio, Weekend All Things Considered, 9/1/01)
Correspondent Phillip Martin reports on the status in the United States of the movement to obtain reparations for slavery, especially at Yale and other Ivy League universities.

Group puts Yale in hot seat over issue of slavery
(New Haven Register, 9/1/01)
A group of Greater New Haven residents on Friday unveiled a five-point plan calling on Yale University to use some of its economic resources to right the wrongs of slavery, an institution from which it says the Ivy League school benefited.

Castro Alves para americano ver
(Jornal do Brasil, 9/2/01)
O paulista Jose Celso de Castro Alves, 29 anos, foi noticia em alguns dos principais jornais do mundo por andar as voltas com causas abolicionistas.

O racismo exposto no campus de Yale
(Jornal do Brasil, 8/31/01)
Oito de 12 predios do campus da Universidade de Yale, uma das mais importantes dos Estados Unidos, esto batizados com nomes de donos de escravos ou ardentes defensores da escravidao.

Yale Naked: A Story of Slavery, Sex and Mammon
(Council on Foreign Relations, 8/24/01)
By Kenneth Maxwell
Timing is everything in the news business, and the timing of three post graduate students at Yale University was perfect.
Originally in "Noticia e Opiniao"

Im Elfenbeinschuldturm
Die schwarze Vergangenheit der US-Eliteuniversität Yale

(Sueddeutsche Zeitung, 8/30/01)
Gab es sie jemals in Amerika, die klare Grenze zwischen Recht und Unrecht, zwischen Freiheit und Unfreiheit? Zwischen
Nordstaaten und Südstaaten?

Yale's history tied to slavery
Paper heats up debate over U.S. reparations

(The Toronto Star, 8/30/01)
Ceremonies now underway to honour Yale University's 300th anniversary have instead sparked renewed debate about the most shameful chapter in American history.

The Problem with Payback
(The Washington Post, 8/28/01)

By Kurt Schmoke, Sr. Fellow of Yale Corporation
Some students at Yale University recently wrote an essay documenting the fact that slaveholders and proponents of slavery, along with abolitionists, figured prominently in the 300-year history of Yale. For me, the essay raises the same question as does any account of slavery: What is to be done today?

The Enduring Legacy of the South's Civil War Victory
(The New York Times, 8/26/01)
By David Brion Davis, Director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center.
The United States is only now beginning to recover from the Confederacy's ideological victory following the Civil War. Though the South lost the battles, for more than a century it attained its goal: that the role of slavery in America's history be thoroughly diminished, even somehow removed as a cause of the war.

Race and Man at Yale
(The Boston Globe, 8/24/01)
When Yale University included in a brochure celebrating its 300th anniversary this year some self-congratulatory lines about its ''long history of activism in the face of slavery,'' three Yale graduate students quickly set the record straight.

The Morse Code of Slavery
(New Haven Advocate, 8/23/01)
"Slavery or the servile relation is proved to be one of the indispensable regulators of the social system, divinely ordained for the discipline of the human race in this world, and that it is in perfect harmony ... with the great declared object of the Savior's mission to earth." --Samuel F.B. Morse

Racism Conference Must Help Shape Perceptions
(Business Day, Johannesburg, 8/23/01)
The Bush administration may have done the world an unwitting favour by digging in on reparations for slavery and Zionism. In the US, a small but significant sign of heightened awareness has been the renewed focus on the debt owed by Yale University.

Should Yale Apologize for Slavery?
(Alfred L. Brophy, History News Service, 8/21/01)
Three graduate students at Yale University have rained on the parade of that university's 300th anniversary by bringing to light Yale's involvement with holding and trading slaves in the nineteenth century.

Names Carved in Stone
(The Christian Science Monitor, 8/21/01)
What's in a name? Potential for a good debate on honor and history.

Vínculo com a escravidão abala Yale
(Folha de Sao Paulo, 8/20/01)
A Universidade Yale ficou constrangida com a divulgao de uma pesquisa que revela ligaões profundas entre a instituiao
e diversos conhecidos defensores da escravido nos Estados Unidos.

Slave ballads of Sade relay drumbeat of warning, freedom
(The Providence Journal, 8/19/01)
Last week, a group of Yale University graduate students published an article reporting that the school named buildings after slave owners as recently as the 1960s. While slavery remains a thin-skinned topic from politics to entertainment, a growing number of musicians are re-examining the topic.

Yale's names reflect history
(New Haven Register, 8/19/01)
Three Yale graduate students have proved once again that a little knowledge combined with a narrow perspective can be a truly dangerous thing.
Read the Letters to the Editor in response.

Cash from Slavery mars Yale 'Birthday'
(The London Times, 8/18/01)
Yale University's celebration of its 300th year has been marred by the disclosure by three of its doctoral students that the institution's past is tainted by slavery. Marking the tercentennial, the university had boasted about its "long history of activism in the face of slavery."

Yale and the Price of Slavery
(New York Times Op-Ed, 8/18/01)

By HENRY WIENCEK
The "presentism" defense, which can be useful for any misdeed, is most commonly deployed when the morality of slavery comes up.
Read the Letters to the Editor in response, August 25.

'Sachem' walked a Freedom Trail
(New Haven Register, 8/18/01)
A month from today in the Grove Street Cemetery — now a nationally recognized pantheon of Yale and New Haven memories — the grave of city father James Hillhouse will be dedicated as a commemorative stop on the Connecticut Freedom Trail.

At Yale, a Pro-Slavery Taint
(International Herald Tribune, 8/17/01)
As it marks its 300th anniversary, Yale University is celebrating what it calls its "long history of activism in the face of slavery" ... But in a research paper, three Yale doctoral candidates say the university is ignoring the murky side of its history.

Yale, Slavery and Abolition
(Wall St Journal editorial, 8/17/01)
This summer holiday has not been kind to our best and brightest. Smack in the middle of Yale's 300th birthday celebrations comes the embarassing news that eight out of ten of its residential colleges are named for ... slaveholders.
Read the responses.

Enlightenment at Yale
(Jewish World Review, 8/17/01)
NEWS FLASH: Yale University has just issued a press release to "regret and renounce" the evils of slavery. One-hundred-and-thirty-six years after the end of the Civil War, the New York Times reports that the venerable institution has now taken a stand on the issue.

Editorial Cartoon: By John Englehart
(Hartford Courant, 8/17/01)

Yale Slavery Case: A Lesson In Responsibility
(The Hartford Courant Op-Ed, 8/17/01)
Researchers at Yale University have rained on the parade of the school's 300th anniversary by bringing to light Yale's involvement with holding and trading slaves.

Yale's Unworthies
(Hartford Courant Editorial, 8/16/01)
It would be unrealistic to expect an institution as old as Yale to be untouched by the abominable practice of slavery and the racist creed that underwrote it.However, what is disconcerting is the university's insensitivity and lack of balance in choosing who and what to honor over the years.
Read the letters to the editor in response.

Making Amends
(WRNI live interview, 8/15/01)
How do people and institutions atone for the sins of generations more than a century removed?

Slavery Taints Yale's History
(CNN.com, 8/15/01)

Yale, Slavery and a Moral Duty
(New York Times, letters to the editor, 8/15/01)
This collection of letters includes one from Rev. Frederick Streets, chaplain of Yale college.

Yale University embarrassed by old links with the defenders of slavery
(The London Independent, 8/14/01)
Yale University has been embarrassed by research revealing deep ties between itself and several prominent defenders of slavery in America.

Grad Students Issue Slavery Scorecard
(Yale Alumni Magazine, 8/14/01)
By now, most people are aware of the pro-slavery sentiments of 19th-century senator John C. Calhoun, for whom Calhoun College is named. But how do the men whose names were given to other Yale colleges stand up on the slavery issue?

Wrestling With the Legacy of Slavery at Yale
(New York Times editorial, 8/14/01)
Americans tend to believe that slavery was peculiar to the South and that the North, particularly the New England states, was "free."
Read "Letters to Editor" from Aug 18 and Aug 19.

A Shameful Past
(Hartford Courant, 8/14/01)
Amid a year of ponderous reflection in celebration of its 300th birthday, Yale University has suddenly found itself snagged in the moral equivocations of its past. On Monday, researchers presented a study of previously undisclosed - or overlooked - links between the university's fav
orite sons and the institution of slavery.

Yale told to admit slave ties
(New Haven Register, 8/14/01)
Yale University should acknowledge it has been "complicit in the institution of slavery," according to a historical report issued Monday by three Yale graduate students.

Yale's Ties to Slave Traders Cited In Report, University Defends History
(DiversityInc.com, 8/14/01)
As Yale University celebrates its 300th anniversary commemorating its, "long history of activism in the face of slavery" a group of researchers published an article that links the university’s initial profit to African-American slavery.

Report looks into Yale, slavery and abolition
(Channel 8, news broadcast)

Essay Explores Slavery as part of university's history
(Channel 3, news broadcast)

Yale University Linked to Slave Trading
(BET, 8/13/01)
Yale University relied on slave-trading money to help provide endowed chairs, early scholarships and a library endowment, according to a new reseach paper.

Slave Traders in Yale's Past Fuel Debate on Restitution
(New York Times, 8/13/01)
As Yale University celebrates 300 years of what it calls its "long history of activism in the face of slavery," three Yale scholars said that the university relied on slave-trading money for its first scholarships and endowments.
Read the "Letters to the Editor" in response on Aug 15.