Excerpts from the Yale and Slavery Project website. Interview and project summary featuring Teanu Reid, PhD Candidate in African American Studies and History.

One of the notable contributions of the Yale & Slavery Research Project will be the investigation of chattel slavery in eighteenth-century New Haven and in connection to Yale College. Many previous histories of Yale relegated slavery to the periphery of their narratives or ignored the subject all together. 

So far, the Eighteenth-Century Research Team has discovered that New Haven once harbored ships sailing directly to and from West Indies islands such as Barbados, a major site of the production of sugar, rum, and molasses during the Atlantic slave trade. As a lucrative seaport, New Haven was able to essentially outbid the towns of Saybrook and Hartford as the new location of Yale College when it moved from its location in Saybrook in 1717. In 1721 and 1727, the Connecticut Assembly explicitly directed taxes from West Indies rum to fund the College. Rum from the Caribbean was produced by numerous enslaved Africans, whose lives were routinely endangered and lost performing the brutal labor of harvesting and processing sugar cane into sugar, rum, and molasses.

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Our research is ongoing and the (hi)story is still unfolding. However, our findings already make clear that slavery was not peripheral to the early development of Yale College. Slavery was a significant component of eighteenth-century Yale. The Eighteenth-Century research team is uncovering this story, or as much as we can find, to give a full(er) history of Yale and Slavery. 

For a short summary of the eighteenth-century research, click here.

For the full video conversation with Professor David Blight, Sterling Professor of History, African American Studies & American Studies, and the Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, click here.