Ellie Park, Multimedia Managing Editor

On Tuesday, the Yale Committee on Addressing the Legacy of Slavery, or CALS, hosted a feedback session to collect input from faculty, students, staff and New Haven community members on future actions Yale should take to address the institution’s historical involvement in slavery.

At the beginning of the session, Kimberly Goff-Crews, the committee chair and secretary and vice president for university life at Yale, highlighted the University’s findings from the Yale & Slavery Research Project that launched in 2020.

Goff-Crews noted that the discoveries made by the project’s historians and scholars were previously made public and recognized by Yale. The full account of findings ultimately culminated in a dedicated website and the publication of Yale and Slavery: A History by professor of history David W. Blight in February 2024.

The book by Blight is just one component of the larger initiative of the Yale & Slavery Research Project, which also includes a lecture series this fall and updates to campus tours.

“We focus on education. We focus on economic viability. And we focus on actually sharing history,” said Goff-Crews on the goals of CALS. “Those are at least three distinct areas in which we think our actions should fit under.”

At the feedback session, Goff-Crews highlighted the success of CALS in creating the Pennington Fellowship for local high school students and the ASCEND program, which partners with HBCUs to fund collaborative grants for faculty and have faculty from HBCUs come to Yale to conduct relevant research.

Goff-Crews also announced that CALS will be officially launching the Yale Teaching Fellowship next Wednesday. 

The Fellowship aims to address New Haven’s teacher shortage by funding a master’s degree and certifying aspiring teachers who teach in the New Haven Public School District for three years.

The conversation then pivoted from CALS’ educational initiatives to the committee’s commitment to economic growth.

“When we talk about economic growth, our focus has been on the Center for Inclusive Growth, which is a partnership between Yale and the City of New Haven,” said Goff-Crews. “The Center’s inaugural director was appointed earlier this year, and the goal is to design and develop strategies to support economic growth that benefits the residents of New Haven.”

Goff-Crews elaborated by highlighting the construction of a state-of-the-art retail, residential and cultural hub that will replace Dixwell Plaza. She believes these projects build on Yale’s longstanding commitment to New Haven and, especially, to historically Black neighborhoods with the $140 million investment in New Haven over six years, announced in 2021.

The focus of the feedback session then shifted to the committee’s actions in recognizing and correcting the past.

“We wanted to make sure that we corrected the past by awarding posthumous master’s degrees to James Pennington and Alexander Crummell … two men who were the first [Black] students at Yale and who went to the Divinity School,” said Goff-Crews. 

In addition to commemorating the first Black graduates of Yale, the committee also called upon Blight to elaborate on his recommendations for CALS.

Blight emphasized that for Yale to rectify its complicated history with slavery, the University needs to restore Woolsey Hall and draw greater attention to the Civil War Memorial in Beinecke Plaza, which commemorates 55 Confederate and 114 Union soldiers from Yale and provides no mention of what the Civil War was fought over.

“It is one of the most remarkable examples anywhere in America of the quest for national reconciliation at the expense of understanding emancipation, or even understanding what the Civil War had been about,” said Blight about the Civil War Memorial. 

Blight then turned to the issue of the inscriptions on the floor of Woolsey Hall, which are “half worn away by a century of students.” He urged the committee to restore and revise the inscriptions of Yale’s statements about the Civil War and to commission a new poem on the walls of the hall.

As the conversation with Blight ended, Goff-Crews turned to the audience for further questions and recommendations.

Rohan Lokanadham ’27, the co-chair of the political and engagement committee of the South Asian Society at Yale, asked for CALS to address the lack of public recognition of Elihu Yale’s ties to the Indian Ocean slave trade and the East India Company, which he noted was well-documented in Blight’s book but not on the website of the Yale & Slavery Research Project.

“I think for me and [others] reconciling with the fact that we go to a university whose namesake exploited our ancestors … it would be better for students to have more accessible information,” said Lokanadham.

Esha Garg ’26, the vice president of Yale College Council, added to the recommendation by calling for the committee to recognize the other exploitations of South Asia that Elihu Yale was a part of, notably his expansive trading of stolen Indian silks and artwork.

Garg and Lokanadham noted that many of these stolen items are still in the University’s possession but are largely kept away from public view.

“We ask that in the future, there are just more intentional efforts to expand the public-facing Yale & Slavery Project content to include this critical piece of Yale’s history, especially because he is our namesake,” said Garg.

Garg, Lokanadham and members of CALS discussed ways to recognize Elihu Yale’s ties to the Indian Ocean slave trade by including information in Camp Yale programs, in critical history tours and in history conversations.

As the session came to a close, Alan Felder, a member of New Haven’s African Council of Community Elders and an employee of Yale for over 45 years, reflected on the sheer amount of progress that CALS has achieved since its inception.

“On a personal level, [this initiative] is one of the greatest things in my lifetime that I have seen in New Haven, as it relates to my past,” said Felder. “I just want to let you guys know that your work, it’s just, it’s incredible.”

A free PDF copy of “Yale and Slavery: A History” by Blight is available online.