Shining Light on Truth: New Haven, Yale & Slavery

“Shining Light on Truth” presents evidence of the essential role of enslaved and free Black people in New Haven and at Yale. It celebrates Black resistance and community building. And it illuminates knowledge kept alive in archives and memory for more than three centuries—even when the dominant culture choses to ignore, bury, or forget.

The exhibition features archival images of materials from Beinecke and other collections, connects to items in the New Haven Museum collections, and notes other local sites of memory. It introduces visitors to some of the unheralded builders of Yale. It celebrates early Black writers such as Jupiter Hammon, Jacob Oson, and William Grimes, and it showcases women such as Mary Ann Goodman, whose generosity opened paths for Black students at Yale, as well as the women who were local pioneers in Black education early in the 19th century.

The exhibition is located in the museum’s upper rotunda and an adjacent gallery room. That gallery has been made into a reading room that evokes a library of the Black college proposed, and thwarted, in New Haven in 1831. Visitors can view dozens of photographs of early Black Yale students and alumni, a number of whom grew up in New Haven. This reading room also features “school albums” with images and biographies of nearly 200 early Black Yale students, from James W. C. Pennington in the 1830s to Shirley Graham a century later in the late 1930s. It will also have bookcases with related texts and reproductions of archival materials. Visitors are encouraged to sit, read, and reflect in this library space.