From its founding in 1887, the Yale Daily News has been inextricably tied to portrayals of the city of New Haven. Once a colonial city mainly populated by white Puritans, immigrants and Black people began slowly migrating to the area during the 1700s, centuries before bigger waves of migration stoked population growth during the 20th century.

As demographic changes took place and community hubs for minorities sprung up, the News began to cover the city’s racial and ethnic groups with more detail and understanding. The News, often representative of the perspectives and biases of its writers, members of Yale’s mainly white student body, met these shifts with coverage that alternated between sympathetic, complex analysis and stories marred with stereotypes and sometimes hostility.

Following the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War, millions of Southern Black people moved north and west during the Great Migration of the 20th century, escaping widespread racist violence, segregationist Jim Crow laws and economic hardships. Even earlier, the News predicted a shift in local demographics “owing to the exodus” of Black people in 1879. 

From the start of the 1960s to the end of the decade, the city’s Black population more than quadrupled despite the total city population shrinking. Picking up on white flight from New Haven during the mass migration of Black people, the News often referred to a process of “tipping” in several neighborhoods. 

Racial tensions between Yale and local Black people grew — toward the end of the decade, the News reported on an incident where Yale Police shut down a Calhoun College mixer due to hundreds of non-Yale Black people showing up. Along with interviewing Black students about their attitudes toward the incident and describing its racialized elements, the News published multiple Letters to the Editor critical of Yale’s racism against local Black people. 

Aside from such tensions during this era, the Yale Daily News also picked up on inequality that Black people and the newly surging Puerto Rican population experienced. During this time, coverage of New Haven became more prominent within the pages of the News. Some neighborhoods, like the largely segregated Dixwell area — which has historically been home to much of New Haven’s Black population — experienced demographic changes and redevelopment plans. In 1968, the News wrote that redevelopment projects in Dixwell “decimated” the Black community, scattering families around the city as the project “laid waste” to their former homes. Another article, published in 1969, included an analysis of housing redevelopment efforts and found that Black families paid more for “slum housing” than Yale students paid for off-campus apartments. However, coverage of urban renewal in minority regions reflected some positive change — one public housing program, according to the News, successfully attracted many low-income Black families back to Dixwell and reinvigorated it as a community hub. 

At the same time, the News regularly imposed biases onto the minority populations it covered during the Black community’s period of growth. The News’ 1968 coverage of efforts to combat violence in the 80% Black neighborhood of Newhallville noted its “lower percentage of welfare cases” and “higher percentage of fathers living with their families,” employing racial stereotypes even as they stood unrelated to the situation. The YDN’s coverage of the Dixwell neighborhood, which was largely sympathetic in centering the inequality Black residents faced and fought against, still nearly always characterized the community by describing its poverty and crime rate. 

News staffers wrote about pleas for more equitable relationships between the Black community, the city and Yale. One May 1970 article described the demands several racial activist groups made to the Yale administration. Such demands included funding thousands of new affordable housing units, providing educational resources to locals in need and giving legal aid to inner city residents facing legal problems related to race and class status. In turn, the News emphasized that the groups were not supportive of demonstrations, instead preferring for the University to better support local minorities. The News also covered racial discrimination in local employment practices and minority groups’ courses of activism, along with programs introduced by aldermen to alleviate the inequalities felt by Black people. 

In a departure from racial stereotypes previously peppered through the News’ coverage of Black locals, articles in the 1980s and 1990s took steps to challenge them. Some articles — like a 1993 feature on efforts to combat “black-on-black crime” in the city — still made use of racial stereotypes and terminology used by whites about Black people, but others approached issues of race with greater sensitivity. A 1983 feature dove into a racial history project by Kathleen Cleaver ’84 — a legendary Black Panther organizer prior to her time at Yale — that revealed thriving centers of Black community life that stood at odds with students’ perceptions of their suffering. Although one 1988 profile titled “New Haven’s Neighborhoods” made notes of poverty rates and unemployment in areas like Dixwell and Newhallville, it went further to describe the regions’ cultural riches and social scene. Furthermore, the News took to describing the economic and social hardships present in minority areas as “hit hard by New England’s economic downturn” in general, as one 1993 piece did. The News also began to implicate Yale more directly in problems of racial injustice in the city: in 1984, the News analyzed salary data and charged Yale with paying Black workers less than white ones, despite the Black workers having been employed longer. 

The 21st century saw a change in tone. Instead of coverage focused on hardship and demographics, more and more articles featured local Black artists, businesses, nonprofits and leaders, showcasing the human faces of the community. Additionally, the News became more vocal about racialized police brutality and reform, notably through extensive coverage across multiple desks after Yale and Hamden police officers shot at two Black locals, Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon. Today, the Yale Daily News’ city desk includes a beat focused on local Black communities. 

Immigration through the lens of the News

Toward the end of the 19th century, New Haven experienced a strong wave of Italian immigration — a wave that Yale students and the News treated with a degree of skepticism. The News advertised one magazine’s contest for the best essay on “The Evils of Unrestricted Immigration” in 1888. The following year, the News reported that when three students at the Law School’s commencement ceremony gave speeches on the restriction of foreign immigration, one speaker “showed clearly that it was our Nation’s duty to see that her foundations be undisturbed by this horde of Irish, German and Italian immigrants.” 

European and Southern Jewish migrants began populating parts of the cities from the end of the 19th century to World War II. Early on, the News reacted to the city’s Jewish population with hostility. After a pair of campus robberies in 1879, the News’ daily log lamented that “the number of Jews, peddlers and tramps frequenting the campus has been constantly increasing.” Although derisive comments and jokes about local Jews and students continued in the paper, the News generally reported on Jewish people more sympathetically after violent pogroms forced millions to flee the Russian Empire for American cities, including New Haven. The News still reported sparingly on New Haven’s Jewish population, but heavily covered Jewish issues in international affairs. During World War Two, it publicized a “Help Stop Hitler” rally organized by New Haven’s civic organizations.

During the 1930s, when the city’s foreign-born and second-generation immigrant population grew to new heights, the News responded with a sense of disdain. In 1932, the Editorial board published a piece titled “Facing a Local Problem,” naming New Haven’s children of immigrants as “most subject to criminal tendencies because of parental laxity.” 

Surprisingly, even as immigration — primarily from Europe — surged during the 1920s and 1930s, the News neglected to substantially cover the local groups themselves. New Polish immigrants, according to a 2020 article, numbered thousands during the 1920s, but the only extensive coverage of Poles came through foreign policy updates.

Long after the demographic changes erupted and public attitudes toward immigration changed, the News reflected on them in retrospect. In one 1985 article, one Yale Daily News reporter described that before the immigration waves of the late 19th century, Yale alumni numbered the city’s powerful elite and government positions. As immigrant groups gained political power, Yale’s roots in the city’s political establishment withered. With immigrant and minority groups receiving a “political edge,” according to the article, a Democrat-dominated political machine rose over the elite, raising tensions between Yale and an increasingly diverse city. 

Taking an apolitical tone, a 1988 profile of New Haven’s neighborhoods characterized the Italians who had previously immigrated to Newhallville, Wooster Square and East Shore as hard-working and economically successful. 

From the 1960s onward, the News primarily wrote about student, faculty and citizen activism when covering New Haven’s growing Latino immigrant population. Some student activist groups involved in serving the local Latino community, like MEChA de Yale and the Puerto Rican Casa Cultural Julia de Burgos were featured in several articles on building relationships between Mexican students and Puerto Ricans in the city. Other articles, often focused on civil rights, included one on Yale faculty’s role in supporting busing programs to integrate Latino students into white schools. 

Still, consistent with stories about the Black community during this period, coverage of Latino people included investigation into sources of the inequality they faced. A 1968 piece criticized New Haven’s “deplorable housing situation” for minorities, noting that thousands of housing units serving Puerto Ricans and Black people were destroyed during urban redevelopment projects.  

Later, during the 1990s, the Latino immigrant population grew more diverse as those from Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Chile and other countries migrated to New Haven. The News reported on feelings of understanding and unity among locals from different countries in Latin America, but at the same time, included material sounding the alarm on the community’s perceived weaker family structure and educational attainment, much like content published on the Black community. Pieces alternated between describing that the Hill, with its large Latino community, had become a “drug trade war zone” and “a hotbed of grassroots community organizing.”

As cultural attitudes toward immigration became more positive overall, many 21st century articles centered on organizations and movements to support the local migrant population. Raids on the homes of undocumented immigrants in the early 2000s prompted local outrage and activism closely covered by the News. Today, immigration coverage often features the work of community outreach organizations like Junta for Progressive Action and Unidad Latina en Acción.