Yale and Slavery

David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale. The Yale and Slavery Research Project was convened in 2020.

“A necessary, hugely readable work.”—Martin Pengelly, The Guardian“Yale and Slavery is a clear-eyed account of an era when university leaders knew slavery was wrong, but supported it nonetheless.”—Vincent Brown, London Review of Books“In recent decades, as public attention has focused on the history and legacy of slavery, universities have begun to examine their own involvement with both. This has often taken the form of reports. . . . Yale and Slavery is different. It is not a report, but a sinuous narrative account. . . . This is the most mature examination ever made of the role of slavery in a university’s past.”—John Samuel Harpham, Times Literary Supplement“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.”—James Steichen, Chronicle of Higher Education“Exhaustively researched, lyrically written, and fearlessly honest, Blight’s book represents not only a worthy capstone to the efforts of the Yale and Slavery Working Group, but also the culmination of a generation of scholarly inquiry into the tangled relationship of universities and slavery.”—James T. Campbell, Stanford University