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"Today, on behalf of Yale University, we recognize our
university's historical role in and associations with slavery,
as well as the labor, the experiences, and the contributions of
enslaved people to our university's history, and we apologize
for the ways that Yale's leaders, over the course of our early
history, participated in slavery," the U.S. educational
institution said in a statement.
In recent years, a growing number of institutions have formally
apologized for their historical role in the transatlantic slave
trade. A desire to confront racist legacies in the U.S. picked
up momentum in 2020 after the death of George Floyd, a Black man
who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer.
Since October 2020, members of the Yale & Slavery Research
Project have conducted research into links to slavery by the New
Haven, Connecticut-based university, making their findings
public.
"Although there were no known records of Yale University owning
enslaved people, many of Yale's Puritan founders owned enslaved
people, as did a significant number of Yale's early leaders and
other prominent members of the university community, and the
Research Project has identified over 200 of these enslaved
people," the statement said.
"Acknowledging and apologizing for this history are only part of
the path forward," the statement added.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington, Editing by Rosalba
O'Brien)
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