Sep 16, 2021
A discussion of the college for Black students proposed to be built in New Haven, its rejection at a town meeting on September 10, 1831, and the importance of the story for New Haven, Yale, and national history. Michael Morand of the Beinecke Library discusses one of the library’s copies of the pamphlet, “College for colored youth : an account of the New-Haven City meeting and resolutions, with recommendations of the College, and strictures upon the doings of New-Haven,” published by Simeon Jocelyn, one of the advocates for building the college. View this item on the digital library: https://collections.library.yale.edu/…
David Blight, Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, joins Morand for questions and answers after the talk.
This episode of Mondays at Beinecke is organized in conjunction with the Yale & Slavery Working Group. Special thanks to Tubyez Cropper of the Beinecke Library and Alvin Ashiatey, an MFA student in the Yale School of Art, valued collaborators in producing this program..
The speaker honors and appreciates the work of numerous scholars and scholarly friends whose words and writings have helped him understand the story of New Haven in 1831 and the proposed Black college. These include: Gilbert Hobbes Barnes, Howard Bell, Joy Burns, Stacey Close, Hugh Davis, Robert Gibson, Katherine Harris, Peter Hinks, Mary Beth McQueeney, Frank Mitchell, Mary H. Mitchell, Hillary Moss, Stacey Close, Charles Warner, Jr., and Robert Austin Warner, among others.He expresses deep gratitude for library colleagues across campus and town – at Yale in the Beinecke Library, Manuscripts & Archives, and Divinity; in the Whitney Library of the New Haven Museum, at the local history room of the New Haven Free Public Library, at the Boston Public Library.
Some essential sources for more information: Colored Conventions Project https://coloredconventions.org
Digital Records of the CCP: https://omeka.coloredconventions.org
Hillary Moss: “Cast down on every side”: The Ill-Fated Campaign to Found an “African College” in New Haven (2007) Online: https://www.ctexplored.org/cast-down-… (with note about longer essays in print by Moss)
James Brewer Stewart: The New Haven Negro College and the Meanings of Race in New England, 1776-1870 In print: The New England Quarterly, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Sep., 2003)
Online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1559806 (may require access through academic institution or library)
Transition Studies 