Albert Miller, an 1885 graduate of Yale Divinity School, was born enslaved in Mississippi a decade before the end of the Civil War. Prior to Yale, he had been a missionary in Sierra Leone, where he conducted the funeral services of Cinque, the famed leader of the Amistad rebellion.

Joseph D. Bibb of Montgomery, Alabama, attended three historically Black colleges before earning a law degree from Yale in 1918; he later joined fellow alumnus Arthur C. MacNeal in establishing a newspaper in Chicago, where they organized city-wide boycotts of businesses that would not hire Black employees.

Rachel Roberta Moore Myrick received her degree in music from Yale in 1934, decades before women of any race were admitted to Yale College. A longtime organist in A. M. E. churches, she was born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, where she died at the age of 101.

These three graduates are among over 300 individuals included in Shining Light on Truth: Early Black Students at Yale, a website launched this spring by the Beinecke’s community engagement team in collaboration with colleagues from Yale Library IT. The website allows users to search and filter by school, hometown, graduation year, and other biographical details.

The website represents the first time findings about Yale’s early Black students have been available to the public, all in one place. The number of alumni profiles continues to grow, thanks to ongoing research.

“We will continue to add and update the site as we learn more, and we hope that making this information available online will encourage others to build on it and use it as a starting point for their own research,” said Jennifer Coggins, community engagement archivist. “This is ongoing work, and there’s still much to learn about the lives, careers, and experiences of these alumni.”

Mohamed Diallo ’26 joined the Shining Light on Truth team as a student intern in spring 2024. Combing through student lists, newspaper articles, class books, and other sources, he has identified over 50 additional students for inclusion in the project. He has also compiled a list of books, articles, and pamphlets written by these alumni. This bibliography helps illuminate the contributions early Black alumni made to fields as varied as religion, law, and literature.

“The primary sources found within Yale and other university archives, newspaper databases, and family records have been a big help in uncovering Black life at Yale,” Diallo said. “In every new student found in the project, we get a better glimpse of how Black students overcame institutional discrimination and became leaders at Yale, in New Haven, and in the communities where they lived after graduation.”

This iteration of research on Yale early Black graduates began as part of work for Yale and Slavery: A History, published in 2024 and available online as a free e-book. The Beinecke team, led by Michael Morand ’87 DIV ’93, director of community engagement, continued the work in preparing for “Shining Light on Truth: New Haven, Yale, and Slavery,” an exhibition at the New Haven Museum from February 2024 to March 2025, which included a room dedicated to displaying photographic portraits of early Black pathfinders.

“Through this effort, we are learning more about the overall history of Black students at Yale and the individual stories of talented and remarkable people who bravely forged paths in American higher education and society,” said Charles Warner, Jr., community engagement manager at the Beinecke and, with Morand, a co-curator of the New Haven Museum exhibition. Warner, a longtime New Havener who also serves as chair of the Connecticut Freedom Trail Site Commission and of the history committee of the Dixwell Congregational Church, among other community roles, added to the dossiers on early Black students during Beinecke research fellowships in 2023 and 2024.

For Warner, the work is personal. “I am driven to find and share these stories of early Black students at Yale and in higher education in general because of who my family is, who I am, and who we all are as one community of Americans,” he said.

In fact, family members, New Haven public school teachers, and local community groups are among those who have used the website to learn more about local and national luminaries—people like James Hathaway Robinson who earned three degrees from Yale (a B.A. in 1912, a master’s degree in economics in 1914, and a Ph.D. in sociology in 1934). Coming of age during segregation, Robinson was an administrator at historically Black colleges and served in leadership positions of several Black professional organizations. Yet he is one of many students included in the project who is not widely known.

Black students have a long history at Yale—much longer than most people realize, said Hope McGrath, research coordinator for Yale, New Haven, and Connecticut History. James W. C. Pennington—a pastor, abolitionist, and author who was awarded an M.A. privatim degree in 2023—attended classes at the divinity school in the 1830s but under restrictions: He was barred from speaking in class or having library privileges.

“As we continue this research, we are learning more about the individuals who found their way to Yale under extraordinary circumstances,” said McGrath. “We also learning about networks and communities: behind every student who overcame tremendous obstacles, under slavery or segregation, to study at Yale, there were family members who supported them and teachers who encouraged them. We are only just beginning to excavate this history.”

A current exhibition, “Shining Light on Truth: Black Lives at Yale & in New Haven,” on view through March 2026 at the Yale Schwarzman Center, includes a selection of photographs and stories of early Black students outside of the Presidents’ Room on the upper floor.

*The photograph is of Rachel Roberta Moore Myrick from the Hartford Public High School yearbook, 1931 (accessed via Connecticut Digital Archive).