The New Haven Museum in Connecticut features a library collection in a 17th, 18th, and 19th century recreation of the city. But one shelf has remained empty throughout these 300 years: what would have been the 1831 shelf containing the publications of the College of Black Youth.

New Haven had the opportunity to establish what would have been the nation’s first black college nearly 200 years ago, but white residents rejected the proposal by a vote of 700 to 4.

Today, New Haven city officials are being asked to issue a public apology for rejecting the school construction proposal.

“Not only did we miss the building and creating that culture, but we also think about all the work that was lost,” said Tubyez Cropper, community engagement program manager at the University of Beinecke Library. Yale.

Four men spoke against the proposal, including three Yale alumni. Only one spoke in favor of the college – an abolitionist and minister, Simeon Jocelyn, who helped propose the initiative with the Rev. Peter Williams, a freed black man from the North.

The proposal’s resolution, drafted by a committee including two prominent founders of Yale Law School, highlighted concerns that the black college would damage Yale’s reputation and constitute an “unjustifiable and dangerous interference” in law enforcement. institution of Southern slavery, according to the resolution document.

The proposal was rejected and followed by violence and legal reprisals against New Haven’s black citizens and white abolitionists.

A 2021 documentary on History, produced by the Beinecke Library, brought considerable attention to the subject. This followed the university’s 2020 announcement of Yale & Slavery Research. Project.

“We have to look at history as dynamic and recognize that it’s not a deep, past story,” New Haven City historian Michael Morand told CNN. “The lost opportunity has repercussions until our present. (Our) contemporary responses must be as broad and as deep as the impact of stories like this in history. »

In August of this year, Morand, along with New Haven’s Beaver Hills Ward Alderman Thomas Ficklin Jr., submitted a proposed resolution to the New Haven Board of Aldermen requesting action by the city. The proposal encourages the provision of educational programs on the events of 1831 in the city school and at Yale University. Board committees held a public hearing on the proposed resolution in late August.

On October 9, 2024, Ficklin died suddenly at his home in New Haven. Ficklin’s wife told the Associated Press one of the last things on his desk was the proposed resolution.

Morand, a longtime friend of Ficklin, said the city official was a “centurion of the New Haven community,” dedicated to opening doors for others. It was this motivation that encouraged him to take action, Morand said.

“He was following the work that others had done to open doors for him,” Morand said.

According to the city, the resolution is still under review.

“Building the nation’s first black college would have been an incredible contribution and asset to our city, and it was truly a missed opportunity for New Haven,” Mayor Justin Elicker said in a statement to CNN.

For Cropper, a Black New Haven resident and producer of the Yale documentary, the documentary and the proposed resolution open the conversation about education as a necessary form of reparations.

“It just made sense to continue to push this story forward because it has this added perspective of educational reparations, and part of the reason why the world can identify black culture in a certain way is due to lack of resources, educational, financial and more. ” Cropper said. “This story takes us to the true origin of it all.”

A resilient movement: “It is clear that people have not given up”

The year 1831 It was the dawn of the abolitionist movement. It was the first annual convention of colored people in Philadelphia and the first time a college for black men in New Haven was proposed and organized.

“It was a networking story,” Morand said. “Black Liberation Networks and the Beginnings of the Congress Movement.”

The proposal for the college lists various reasons why New Haven was best suited for the first black college, including that “its people are friendly, pious, generous and humane” and that its laws “protect all without regard to complexion.” . The city’s ties to the West Indies also show promise for the creation of a college that could advance the global liberation movement, the proposal states.

“In addition to black Americans coming to this college, there would likely have been black Haitians, black Jamaicans and others who could have returned to their home countries and contributed to the development and liberation of Jamaica, d ‘Haiti and other places,’ Morand said. CNN.

But this vision never came to fruition.

The day before Minister Jocelyn’s speech to the Third Congregational Church promoting the college, news of Nat Turner’s rebellion first appeared in the New Haven newspapers.

The insurrection resulted in the murders of more than 60 white women, men and children in Southampton, Virginia. According to the documentary, historians partly attribute the rebellion’s rejection of the proposal four days later.

The proposal and the near-unanimous vote against it made national news, as did the riots that followed. The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper in New Haven, reported that an abolitionist’s home was attacked and stoned, that a home owned by a freed black man in Mount Pleasant was “razed” and that black men were pushed in the streets.

The reactions were described as an “admirable lesson” in a Richmond newspaper that year.

On May 24, 1833, the Connecticut State Legislature passed the “Black Law“, preventing blacks from entering the state for education and prohibiting the establishment of schools for blacks. In it, lawmakers cite the College for Black Youth and an informal school for black women in 1832.

According to Morand, New Haven missed the opportunity to have influence similar to that of HBCUs today, which produce 70 percent of black doctors, 50 percent of black lawyers and 40 percent of black engineers. according to the data published by the White House in 2022.

“While we cannot be certain of the impact this decision would have had, the impact would have been enormous for Black families, the Black community, and for liberty and justice for all, for the entire nation “, said Morand.

However, according to Morand, the movement was not stopped by the rejection, but simply reoriented.

Jocelyn, the minister who promoted the proposal, eventually left town – but continued his work alongside other influential black leaders. Cropper says it is the work of these leaders that has contributed to today’s reality.

“I want to make a bold statement that they are the reason we have this equality that we have today,” Cropper said. “These are brave men and women who just took a chance in the dark and knew it was the right and only step.”

In 1837The African Institute was founded, becoming the first black institute of higher education in the country. It is now called Cheyney University of Pennsylvania.

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