Yale apologizes for links to slavery

But race remained a highly charged topic at Yale, which has had an often contentious relationship with the local black community. And the university's record was thrust into the national spotlight with the debate over the renaming of Calhoun College, a student residence named after John C. Calhoun, the antebellum senator from South Carolina and architect of Southern secession. (In 2017, it was renamed in honor of Grace Murray Hopper, a pioneering computer scientist who became a rear admiral in the US Navy.)

Still, Blight, a leading scholar of the Civil War and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Frederick Douglass, said he was “stunned” when Salovey called him in September 2020 and asked him to take on the project.

“This did not come from any desire on the faculty,” he said. “It came from the president himself.”

Blight said he agreed as long as he and the team he assembled could write a “real narrative history” rather than just a report. He said neither he nor any of the other Yale faculty members who contributed were paid. “We wanted to avoid the appearance that we were profiting from the Yale story,” he said.

They were given free rein in their research and the university made no effort to check what they wrote, he said.

The book, of which the most important findings are also presented on a websitebegins with the early history of Connecticut, where in the 18th century about 50 percent of the economy was tied to trade with the West Indies, which depended on slavery.

One of the most fascinating moments, Blight said, was the antebellum period, when Yale students and faculty were on both sides of the slavery issue, and the university — which in the 20th century tended to emphasize its abolitionist history — pursued a policy of “aggressive moderation,” as Blight calls it. “They didn't want to take sides until the 1850s,” he said.