When shall we hear the joyfull sound … that slavery is no more?” So asked Jupiter Hammon, an enslaved man whose life in New England saw the beginning and end of the American Revolution but not his own emancipation, at the end of his 1786 poem, “An Essay on Slavery.” Hammon’s is among the many voices and experiences incorporated into Yale and Slavery: A History. Despite the economy of its title, the volume, authored by Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale historian David Blight and published by the university’s own press, offers more than a chronicle of the storied university’s ties to America’s so-called “peculiar institution.” This is not just a book about Yale: It is a case study of how deeply slavery was embedded in the personal and professional lives of the white establishment in both the North and South. It provides a deeply researched panorama of America’s psychic and literal investment in the enslavement of Native American and African people.
While the Yale and Slavery Research Project officially started in 2020, the book that it has produced was in fact some 25 years in the making. The conversation and internal debate that ultimately led to this book’s publication was kicked off in 2001 upon the occasion of Yale’s 300th anniversary, when a group of graduate students issued a paper calling for the university to own up to its complicity with slavery and be honest about its relationship with abolitionist causes.
Published in February 2024, Yale and Slavery now feels as if it belongs to another decade or even century, so radically have the stakes of such inquiries regarding race and American history changed in the intervening year and a half. Through legal and financial pressure campaigns on institutions including Harvard and the University of Virginia, or targeted intimidation against students such as Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University, the Trump administration has in less than a year drastically altered the climate on university campuses, especially concerning discourse around racial equity. The shifting political headwinds facing Yale and other universities make the findings and premise of Yale and Slavery all the more important. The very existence of such a volume — already available in paperback — is worthy of attention even if, or rather precisely because, few institutions are likely to undertake similar work in the years to come.
Yale and Slavery offers new perspectives on the lived experiences of some of America’s most famous figures and brings to light the stories of lesser-known heroes, villains, and ordinary citizens, all the while attempting to make legible the experiences and identities of the enslaved, whom previous historians of the university did not bother to regard. To call the project an exercise in excavation is something of a misnomer, since its facts and information derive from sources that were always hiding in plain sight, the bulk of them held in the university’s own archives.