Doc Reveals The New Haven HBCU That Could Have Been

On Wednesday night at the New Haven Museum, New Haveners had a chance to learn, together, about an uncomfortable truth: that, in 1831, New Haven’s white community leaders overwhelming rejected a serious proposal to found what would have been the first U.S. Black college, on the land where the interchange of I‑95 and I‑91 now exists.

That story is told in What Could Have Been: America’s First HBCU, a short and powerful documentary written by Tubyez Cropper and Michael Morand of the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library and directed and edited by Cropper. Released in April 2022, the film on Wednesday night enjoyed a robust audience at the museum on Whitney Avenue dedicated to New Haven’s history.

Morand, the Beinecke’s director of community engagement, offered an ​“origin story” for the making of the film, which grew out of the Yale & Slavery Research Project, established in 2020. Morand noted previous efforts to draw attention to the story of the attempt to found a Black college in New Haven. In 1991, the New Haven Colony Historical Society ran an article in its journal about it. In 2001, it was mentioned again in a report by the Amistad Committee. It’s addressed yet again in the 2016 book African American Connecticut Explored, Yet many in New Haven remain unaware that it happened. Two years ago, when the Yale & Slavery Research Project began, Morand starting asking fellow New Haveners: ​“Did you know that New Haven would have been the site of the first Black college in the nation? And not a lot of people knew.” By contrast, ​“I bet if I ask people here, ​‘ever heard of the Amistad?’ pretty much everybody would know that.”

“The fact that the story gets forgotten is part of the story of the film, and part of what we all need to grapple with,” Morand said. ​“What does that say about what we remember and why we remember?” What Could Have Been seeks to ​“recover and recenter this essential story to do, using the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, ​‘history worthy of grown folks.’ ”

A first screening at the Beinecke in 2021 drew a couple hundred live and about 1,500 virtually. Subsequent screenings and an article in Yale’s alumni magazine drew more eyes. ​“It was clear that there’s real hunger to know more about this story and a real audience for it” Morand said. ​“It was also clear … that words alone are not enough.” To ​“tell the story right,” a documentary was needed. Morand turned to Cropper, the Beinecke’s community engagement program manager, who was born and raised in New Haven and started working at the Beinecke as a New Haven Promise intern in 2018. Cropper is now a ​“key leader in … bringing people to Beinecke and bringing Beinecke to the people.” Cropper, aided by a crew of scholars and community members, put together the documentary that tells the story; it has been watched online about 13,000 times, which Morand called ​“good traction.”

“But there’s no substitute for seeing things together, and thinking about it together, and appreciating it together.” he added. It was also an opportunity to spread the word about the documentary, so that more people could know what could have been.

In introducing the film, Cropper noted wryly that ​“history has an interesting stigma of being too old to be relevant,” yet in working on the film, he and colleagues were struck by how 1831 was in many ways ​“not that long ago.” Many of the ​“things in the story still exist, and that puts it in perspective for all of us.” It ​“allows young children to walk these streets and immerse into that history,” and see ​“where these people walked, where these committees happened, where all of these events took place.” 

New Haven is rich in special collections, full of primary sources, that ​“we have an obligation to share,” Cropper said. ​“We have an obligation to make sure the world — starting locally, of course … knows of the existence of stories like this. Stories like this that have been buried.” The documentary is an attempt to rectify that. 

“Primary sources allow us to relive, not ignore. We have a duty … to make sure that everyone knows that this happened. I won’t say names of states and governments, but certain parts of the nation are trying to hide it, are trying to get rid of it, are trying to make sure students never learn about it again, and these sources — whether it’s this video or a primary source that a student can hold and look through — it matters, and it makes it that much more real. Seeing is believing, and primary history allows us to see, step into, and relive, so that we can engage the past and the present for the future.”

In a fleet 25 minutes, What Could Have Been details the history of the effort to found a Black college in New Haven in the first half of the 19th century. At the time, New Haven was the co-capital of the state and had one of the most educated populaces in the country. Yale was the biggest college in the country, and New Haven was a growing city, accumulating wealth and attracting immigration. It was also a place where slavery was still legal; it would not be abolished in Connecticut until 1848. Free Black people faced real restrictions. They could not vote and had few chances for education or employment.

In 1830, Black and White abolitionists meeting in Philadelphia conceived of the idea of founding a Black college in New Haven. New Haven pastor Simeon Jocelyn bought an expansive property on the southern end of East Street for the purpose. The backers of the effort were attracted to New Haven because, in their words, ​“the site is healthy and beautiful,” the city’s ​“inhabitants are friendly, pious, generous, and humane,” its laws ​“are salutary and protect all without regard to complexion … boarding is cheap and provisions are good,” and the location was ​“as central as any other than can be obtained with the same advantages.” As the proposal developed, word spread, and in September of that year, Jocelyn gave a speech in New Haven outlining the necessity for the college.

Days later, news reached New Haven of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in Virginia. Days after that, then-New Haven mayor Dennis Kimberly called for a town hall meeting, in which the proposal to found the Black college was rejected, 700 to 4. (Murmurs from the audience at the New Haven Museum rose as this fact was revealed in the documentary.) The reasons for the rejection were not subtle. One resolution argued for the need to preserve states’ rights for Southern states (that is, to continue to support slavery). Another resolution declared that the proposed Black college was a threat to Yale. Another argument, even more baldfaced, objected to the very idea of drawing more Black people to New Haven, as ​“it would communicate the world the impression that New Haven was overrun with a vicious population; for throughout the United States vice is uniformly associated with a large colored population.”

Even rejecting the proposal sparked riots and violence against Black people in New Haven. Southern leadership and media noticed and approved. Two years later, David Daggett, a justice of Connecticut’s Superior Court — who had spoken against the college’s founding in 1831 — oversaw a case leading to the closing of a Black women’s college elsewhere in Connecticut. Daggett’s ruling was later used as precedent supporting the Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, denying free Black people the rights and protections of citizenship in the United States and upholding slavery.

So the rejection of the founding of the college reverberated loudly for years, and, one could argue, well into the present; part of its lasting legacy lies in the fact that the proposed site of the college lies in what is now a kind of no-man’s-land. The interchange of I‑91 and I‑95 ensures that nothing else will be built there any time soon.

After the screening, Cropper had a few more words to say. ​“The question in the title — what could have been? — we want all of you to think about that, to answer it. We think about this all the time. We think about what it would have meant for the progression of our nation. How much sooner would slavery have been abolished? How more prosperous would New Haven and Connecticut have been if they had great race relations?… How would New Haven look? How would Black culture in America look?… We want you to think about that,” he said.

“It all exists. It all happened,” he concluded. ​“A lot of the history still exists, here in New Haven. With the buildings, and with our imagination, we can relive it, understand it, and pass it on. If you’re an educator, teach it to your students. If you’re a parent, teach it to your children … because stories like this, there’s millions more of them out there, and bringing them to life helps bridge that gap of knowledge.”