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…