A controversial report fuels demands that the University address its tainted past

Can reparations heal Yale's slavery scars?

By Sam Frank

The pews at Center Church on the Green were occupied but not nearly full, holding at most 200 in a building that can seat many times that number. The crowd, mixed in age, race, and occupation, was interested but only sometimes passionate—applauding on cue for the speakers but rising to a cheer less consistently; taking just a few tentative-to-tempered turns at the open mike before giving the floor back to the pulpit for closing words from the Reverend Scott Marks. His words, however, bespoke the ardor of what could come: "If we stand together, we will win this fight!" A fight whose terms are still being outlined, but whose term is already defined: reparations, amends for Yale's perhaps lingering, perhaps illusory ties to slavery.

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 Havenites— grad students, local clergy, political activists, unionized workers—who feel compelled to make Yale take its own steps toward reparations. A feeling-out for a group of New Havenites—regular undergrads, regular citizens, the kind and quantity of people that a movement needs to become a movement. People who feel sympathetic toward the passions expressed but uneducated about the purported ties and uncertain about what, if anything, should be done. For what can be done, after all, to atone for and repair the damage done by an entire society—and by a university within that society—to an entire race of people? Especially now that the society has changed, and the university along with it.

THE TOWN MEETing came—as only the beginning, organizers hope—in the wake of this summer's Yale, Slavery, and Abolition: Yale University and Its Legacy, a report written by three Yale graduate students. Published by New Haven's Amistad Committee (whose mission, according to founder and president Al Marder, is "to use history to talk about our history today"), the 48-page report attracted worldwide attention. It claims that Yale was founded on the backs of slaves; that the University's first scholarship, first endowed professorship, and first library were funded with profits from the slave trade; that the men Yale honors in stone—John C. Calhoun, Samuel F.B. Morse, Timothy Dwight, George Berkeley—held slaves or otherwise supported the institution of slavery.

But on campus, the reaction has been muted. The Administration has been circumspect, faculty members have quietly criticized aspects of the report, and campus publications have run a few brief articles. Other than that, nothing—no fiery editorials, no protests, no outcry.

"I thought it was an interesting examination of an aspect of Yale's history. I found it interesting reading," University President Richard Levin, GRD '74, said of the report. To its authors, who resent the cold shoulder they've gotten, that kind of non-statement almost qualifies as an oration. Antony Dugdale, GRD '00, one of the three authors of Yale, Slavery, and Abolition, claims that "the principal thing I want is a real honest dialogue throughout the entire campus, between the town and the gown, and for Yale to be engaged in it." Dugdale and his co-authors are upset over what they see as Yale's Tercentennial self-puffery. "Yale was playing up its abolitionist heroes, [but] there was no indication that they'd be honest about the other side of their history," he said.

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Despite the international media blitz, the Office of Public Affairs' web

site has only three off-site links related to the report. One is a New Haven Advocate pro-Yale editorial. Another, a Washington Post opinion piece by Kurt Schmoke, DC '71, ex-mayor of Baltimore and current Yale Corporation member, is entitled "The Problem with Payback." The third, a lengthy New York Times article by David Brion Davis, GRD '70, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center (GLC) for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, barely deals with the report. Instead, it focuses on how enmeshed the entire United States, as opposed to only the South, has been with slavery throughout its history. The only Yale-published piece to deal even tangentially with the report is one on a GLC- and Amistad Committeesponsored celebration of the life of abolitionist James Hillhouse, Class of 1773.

THAT'S THE SAME JAMES HILLHOUSE WHOSE NAME Reverend Eric Smith, DIV '95, would have replace Samuel Morse's on Morse College. Morse, the report quotes, called slavery "divinely ordained for the discipline of the human race in the world." Smith, along with his group, Black Thought for Justice and Change (BTJC), thinks statements like that are grounds for action. Though not directly affiliated with the authors of Yale, Slavery, and Abolition, BTJC is using the report as evidence in its case. Appearing on the Sun., Sept. 2 edition of the New York region public affairs show Like It Is—the longest-running African-American-produced television program in the country—Smith made his position clear: if the 19th century was about ending slavery and the 20th was about equal rights, the 21st must be the century of reparations for African-Americans.

Reparations is a big issue, poised to get bigger. Prominent conservative figures like David Horowitz have crusaded against it; Horowitz's anti-reparations advertisement, entitled "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks Is a Bad Idea for Blacks—and Racist Too," has run in college newspapers across the country. When the Brown Daily Herald ran the ad, it so inflamed a group of students that they stole the issue's entire run. Political figures like Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) have sponsored legislation for its study. This past June, the New Haven Board of Alders, led by Jelani Lawson (D-2), MC '96, approved H.R. 40, a resolution that gave the Board's endorsement to Conyers's efforts. The United Nations debates it; at the recent World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, the United States walked out amid demands for language endorsing reparations. No such language was included in the final document, though passages calling the transatlantic slave trade an "appalling traged[y] in the history of humanity" were.

"It's clear people think we're talking about direct payout akin to what happened to Japanese Americans after World War II," Smith said recently. "That's not what I'm talking about. The group I'm working with isn't talking about payout. Nobody I've heard at the national level is talking about direct payout." Rather, he said, it's "economic development" that's the issue—making sure that the beneficiaries of slavery help repair the communities they once exploited.

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At the town meeting, Smith exploded. "We have come together and are prepared to make some demands on Yale University," he declared. "It must be the demand of the entire New Haven community." On Fri., Sep. 14, he and BTJC met with Administration representative Michael Morand, associate vice president of the Office of New Haven and State Affairs, to present their demands. According to the group, Yale should 1) rename Calhoun College (currently named after former U.S. Vice President John C. Calhoun, who, the report quotes, held "slavery to be a good") after James Pennington (a black abolitionist who audited courses at Yale) and Morse College (whose namesake claimed that slavery "is ordained by God and the Bible") after Hillhouse; 2) expand its home-buyers program to all black New Haven residents; 3) create an economic development fund to provide grants and no-interest loans to African-American-owned businesses; 4) provide scholarships to black New Haven students towards the college of their choice; 5) change the term Master to something "more culturally sensitive"; 6) increase African-American representation among faculty and upper-level administration; and, more generally, 7) "establish some sort of social contract with the community."

Interviewed after the meeting, Brown was less fiery than the more extreme of those demands might indicate. "I thought it went well," he said. "It established a solid basis for continued dialogue." Constructive discussions were held, he said. Yale talked about its positive involvement in the New Haven and explained its position on renaming the residential colleges. But Brown and his colleagues made clear that they wouldn't be satisfied until change occurs. Divine Shabazz, BTJC's "Minister of Information," denounced Calhoun College's name. "We think it's devastating to the psyche of black students and black workers in New Haven," he said. Marder was even harsher. "Why is John C. Calhoun College not [seen as] a Confederate flag sitting in New Haven?" he asked.

"THE UNIVERSITY HAS DEBATED [THE ISSUE] THREE or four times in the last 50 years and decided that acknowledging and understanding our past is appropriate," Levin said. "Calhoun College is a place of its own right now—alumni think of Calhoun College with fond memories of their own time there. Changing [the name] now is changing that place that so many have such strong ties to. My view is that we should take the existence of Calhoun College as a fact of Yale's history, and not solely as a recognition of John C. Calhoun." To which Marder could only reply, "South Carolina. Wasn't the Confederate flag part of their history? No one denies that. Does that make it right? What kind of tradition are you lauding? I think President Levin didn't mean what he said, frankly."

The debate seems to center, finally, on different understandings of history and how to interpret it: opponents of reparations at Yale and elsewhere have castigated "presentism," the judgment of past events by contemporary standards. "We have to be open," Levin said. "The art of a liberal education is being able to study alternative realities, imagine different times and different conditions. But to impose on those times modern thinking is not always a good idea." As Schmoke argued on Like It Is, Calhoun and Morse were highly accomplished men within a society thoroughly entangled with slavery; against that background, can one let the part overtake the whole? He took even greater offense at another perceived presentism in BTJC's demands, calling the furor over Master—a term inherited from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, not Southern plantations—"the height of historical revisionism and political correctness."

Schmoke instead praised the reaction of Henry Louis Gates, CC '73, who held meetings of prominent black intellectuals in Calhoun College in order to emphasize the irony and the poetic justice made possible by changing times. Gates called attention to Yale's status as the first Ivy to create an African American studies program. And in his Washington Post op-ed [8/28/01], he wrote, "As a member of Yale's board of trustees, I know that the University is doing what many people would no doubt suggest: ensuring that any qualified student of color, regardless of means, is given the financial aid to attend Yale; recruiting a racially diverse faculty and staff; sub-stantially investing in its urban community; and supporting scholarship on the history of slavery, such as through the recently established Gilder Lehrman Center...I suggest that we will be better served by focusing our energies primarily on the question of how we strengthen ourselves for the future, rather than how we compensate for the wrongs of the past."

NEITHER BTJC NOR THE REPORT'S AUTHORS DENY that Yale has done a great deal for New Haven. But they suggest that the report should serve as catalyst for, as Dugdale put it, "things that would be good anyway. [Yale's] past just gives [it] an added incentive for doing that."

Presentism notwithstanding, the reactions of black New Haven residents to the word Master, or the feelings of Kenneth Brown, a cook in Calhoun, upon hearing the college's name or seeing a dining hall stained-glass window that depicts slaves picking cotton, are hard to deny. "Its racial tones and the pictures that they have there are offensive," Brown said at the town meeting.

Arguments over history can pale before the force of emotion—and if, as with the reactions to Yale, Slavery, and Abolition, emotion and historical argument go together, it's not hard to imagine the former emerging on top. Some academics dispute the report's negative findings on certain specific figures, like Timothy Dwight, who is portrayed as a fervent anti-abolition- ist. Others question its historical methodology, such as highly selective quotations and perhaps unwarranted conclusions drawn from narrow case studies. But the emotion is real. One only had to hear the reaction of Rosa Dasher, a worker in Timothy Dwight College, at the town meeting. "Are we free? We say `free,' but are we truly free?" she yelled.

Will the confrontation between emotion and tradition, between competing views of history, ever come? Or will the report fade away with the year 300? An educational session on reparations is planned for October, but without a truly visceral outcry both on campus and off, it might be difficult to think Marder right when he said, "A great university corrects itself, not justifies itself. You can't justify this to the community. You can't tell the people of New Haven that this is a part of history and you should let it be."

Front graphic and photo by Erin Lewis and Chip Lockwood. Front portraits, clockwise from top, James Hillhouse, Samuel Morse, John Calhoun. Jump photo collage by Chip Lockwood.

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