Black Students at Yale (BSAY) leaders Ralph Dawson (B.A. '71) and Kurt Schmoke (B.A. '71), protesting the New Haven Black Panther trials, disrupt Senator Edward M. Kennedy's speech on Earth Day and environmental issues at a Yale Political Union meeting in Commons, photograph by Stephen West
By Ralph C. Dawson
As I look back over my 50-year association with Yale, I see that it has had a tremendously positive impact upon me. I want to thank Yale for preparing me and many other Black students to thrive in the complicated and highly competitive environment in which we have lived over the last half century. I also want to thank the institution for better preparing all of its students to function and lead in the more diverse society that Yale has helped to create during those years. These 50 years have been an important part of the arc of history in higher education, and Yale has done much to help shape that path. Yale’s contributions should be recognized and celebrated.
But first, I must note that Yale is not a perfect place. It has been and continues to be a place where some unlawful discrimination occurs, and it continues to have some of the infirmities of unconscious bias that are present at many institutions in our society. It is obligated to address those infirmities with urgency, particularly given the new level of attention brought to light by the horrific instances of violence against Blacks (and others of color), at a time when many in our society have finally been compelled by recent events to acknowledge that Black Lives Matter. When we say George Floyd’s name, we remind others and acknowledge for ourselves the centuries of brutality which continue to manifest themselves in modern day forms, and are a challenge to Yale, and every other institution in our society. so, my purpose here is not to give Yale a pass.
Until the mid-1960’s, Yale’s educational mission had been to produce leaders in a context that was lily white, stratified and tied to a traditional notion that a Yale man was a WASP, with a long tradition of family legacy matriculation at Yale.
It is my purpose, however, to acknowledge that Yale has made a valuable contribution to the expansion of opportunities for Blacks in our society, and that it deserves credit for those valuable contributions, which have benefitted Blacks and the broader American society as well. Much of the history I will recount are matters in which I was personally involved, or were documented by the works of Geoffrey Kabaservice, Yale ‘88, Ph.D. ‘99, author of The Guardians, who has chronicled the history of Kingman Brewster and his impact on Yale. The matters discussed herein are documented in Kabaservice’s article entitled “The Birth of a New Institution,” which appeared in the December 1999 edition of the Yale Alumni Magazine.
Until the mid-1960’s, Yale’s educational mission had been to produce leaders in a context that was lily white, stratified and tied to a traditional notion that a Yale man was a WASP, with a long tradition of family legacy matriculation at Yale. However, Kingman Brewster, its then relatively new President, wanted to make a change to provide greater opportunity and social mobility, and he led a determined effort to include Black students in that diversification. Yale wanted to produce effective leaders for an increasingly diverse society. To paraphrase a relevant portion of a U.S. supreme Court case, exercising its prerogative as a university to determine who may teach, what to teach, and who may be admitted to study, Yale sought to address the vexing problems of systemic racism and lack of diversity by diversifying its student body.
To pursue that goal Brewster chose a new Dean of Admissions, Inslee “Inky” Clark, ‘57, and Clark put together a group of Admissions officers, including Willie “Bill” Robinson, who Clark hired as the first African-American Admissions officer in the Ivy league. That group fundamentally changed recruiting at Yale. Robinson, who would later serve for a time as Brewster’s special Assistant to the President, was a key contributor to Yale’s nationwide search for talented Black students. The new admissions team expanded the talent search pool to include not only Blacks, but also other students of color, Jews, and by 1969, women. They were aided in those changes by other administrators and faculty who enthusiastically sup- ported those changes at Yale, including: Charles Taylor, ‘50, Yale’s Provost; Henry Chauncey, Jr. ‘57, Special Assistant to the President, and later university Secretary; William Sloane Coffin, ‘49, the Chaplin; and faculty members, Professors Robert Dahl, Ph. D. ‘40, Robert Farris Thompson, ‘55, ‘61, Ph.D. ‘65, Edwin Redkey, M.A. ‘64, Ph.D. ‘67, and Sidney Mintz. Yale’s ability to diversify was also enhanced by its decision beginning in 1963 to adopt a need-blind admissions financial aid policy, becoming the first university to do so in the United States.
Yale’s changes in the admissions procedures were not an easy transition. Yale valued its role as an institution turning out legacy students known more initially for their polish, though many had become great leaders. But Yale recognized that in the American society of the future, leadership needed to come from a broader spectrum of our society. This change was met with significant resistance.
As Kabaservice reported,
Clark remembered that in the first year of his deanship, he was hauled before the Yale Corporation to report directly on his changes in admissions policy. one of the Corporation members who had “hemmed and hawed” throughout Clark’s presentation finally said, “Let me get down to basics. You’re admitting an entirely different class than we’re used to. You’re admitting them for a different purpose than training leaders.” Clark responded that in a changing America, leaders might come from nontraditional sources, including public high school graduates, Jews, minorities, and even women. His interlocutor shot back, “You’re talking about Jews and public-school graduates as leaders. Look around you at this table”—this was at a time when the Yale Corporation included some of America’s most powerful and influential men. “These are America’s leaders. There are no Jews here. There are no public-school graduates here.”
Brewster and Clark were not deterred. They felt that Yale had a duty as an institution to help prepare for a successful, more diverse, society. As Brewster wrote in his 1967 statement of admissions policy, “[a]n excessively homogeneous class will not learn anywhere near as much from each other as a class whose backgrounds and interests and values have something new to contribute to the common experience.”
Clark remembered Brewster insisting at alumni gatherings: “‘Yale wants to train the very best within the black community. We’ve got to turn out the black leaders of the future. The Martin Luther Kings of this world are going to come from Yale.’ It was very selfish for Yale, in the best sense. Yale was not for a minute changing its elitist approach to its role in world leadership.” It was seeking to expand the backgrounds and pools from which those leaders would come.
Yale’s commitment was necessary and laudable. Brewster, as a forward- thinking American educational leader, understood some of the history of Blacks in America. Brewster and Clark saw and confronted the reality that changes had to be made. They had an understanding of American history and the effects of the peculiar institution of slavery, and its peculiar legacy. They saw the great challenge — to overcome the past, present, and current effects of discrimination, grounded in 256 years of slavery and maintained by 100 years of Jim Crow de jure and de facto segregation.
That state of affairs was reinforced by the odd and pernicious notion that as soon as the overt legal strictures were lifted, Blacks should be expected to compete with no redress or compensation by the society for that historical past. Brewster and his colleagues assessed the state of affairs much as President Lyndon Johnson had in in a speech at Howard University in 1965. President Johnson said:
Imagine a hundred-yard dash in which one of the two runners has his legs shackled together. He has progressed ten yards, while the unshackled run- ner has gone fifty yards. At that point the judges decide that the race is unfair. How do they rectify the situation? Do they merely remove the shack- les and allow the race to proceed? Then they could say that “equal opportunity” now prevailed. But one of the runners would still be forty yards ahead of the other. Would it not be the better part of justice to allow the previously shackled runner to make up the forty-yard gap, or to start the race all over again? That would be affirmative action toward equality.
This context is important and often overlooked. It is not seriously debatable that Blacks have been held back for centuries in our country. In evaluating the justification for affirmative action, it should be remembered there is no Black American alive who will live long enough to reach an age equivalent to the amount of time that Blacks in America lived under the systematic debilitation imposed upon them in slavery. And few, if any, will live as long as the time that Jim Crow segregation prevailed. During this period, Blacks were systematically excluded from government programs such as social security, government guarantees for mortgages found in White communities but specifically denied to Black communities, and the denial of educational opportunities under the GI Bill. The GI bill benefits were administered by local segregationist veterans Administration officers throughout the south where most Blacks resided, and some in the north. so, there was, and remains, some catching up to do.
Moreover, when Brewster set out to address this problem, he was not, as current notions assume, depriving those of highly demonstrated merit of a previously afforded opportunity to attend Yale. As the research done by Kabaservice shows, before that time Yale was largely making itself available to the legacy applicants, those who by birth and privilege were part of families that had historically sent their sons to Yale. A significant number of those legacy applicants came from the well-known prep schools of the day, but not all of them came from the top of the class of the Exeters and Andovers. They included students from the bottom and middle of the class, whose principle achievement had been the families into which they were born; and some of those students had achievement scores on the SATs only slightly higher on average, than those of Black students and some others whom Brewster and Clark had determined to pursue.
In that sense, Brewster and Clark had determined to expand the scope of “legacy” admissions to include people with a legacy of subjection to discrimination and deprivation, because Brewster believed that Yale could help to produce Black people capable of being nation- al leaders, just as Yale had done with its previous legacy admissions. From about 1965 for- ward, Yale set about expanding its admissions and educational mission, and Black students set about both getting a great Yale education and improving the quality of education produced by Yale for all of its students.
Black students assisted in successful efforts to recruit more Black students in the early years, assisting Yale in developing procedures that enable Yale to attract and admit substantial numbers of Blacks today. It’s impossible to recreate the pool we were swimming in at Yale during those years. Under the leadership of students like Donald Ogilvie, ‘68, Armstead Robinson, ‘68,’ Craig Foster, ‘69 and Raymond Nunn, ‘69, Black students conceived of, lobbied for, and were the architects of, the first African-American studies major developed at an American university. significantly, contrary to any intent to separate, the students insisted that the structure of the major be interdisciplinary, so that it would be strengthened by, integrally linked to, and cross-pollinated with other relevant departments like History, Political science, Economics and American studies.
They caused the establishment of the Afro-American Cultural Center to facilitate an easier transition for some Blacks to the Yale environment and to add an Afro-centric element to the overall university environment. Consistent with those goals, the center has lived up to its mission as “Yale’s home away from home for its Black student body and all people who wish to learn about and celebrate the histories, cultures, and traditions of the African Diaspora.” Those initiatives and others have improved the quality of education available not only to Black students, but to all students at Yale, providing all a more realistic and holistic context in which to prepare to participate in a diverse society.
Moreover, Black students played a pivotal role in the most traumatic experience that ever occurred at Yale — May Day, 1970. In the chaotic collision of anti-war sentiment, the murder trial of the Black Panthers, and Yale as a major American institution in transition that many, then and now, see as a place to make a public stand, there were predictions that Yale could suffer immense damage to its physical structure and its reputation were it to have mishandled the confrontations occurring at Yale during May Day. The Black student Alliance at Yale worked with other students, the Black Panther Party, anti-war demonstrators and the Yale Administration to achieve a smooth landing in which every group, including the Panthers, had their say, and the University through the deft leadership of Brewster, played an important societal role in highlighting the difficulty and importance of Black revolutionaries getting a fair trial in American courts. As the Head of the Black student Alliance at Yale during that time, I worked with Kurt Schmoke and other Black students to achieve that smooth landing, and to ensure that the University also acted in a manner beneficial to the local community around Yale.
Brewster’s vision and his commitment to what we refer to today as diversity and inclusion, continue to be factors in Yale’s approach to admissions and education today. But Yale also remains under attack for its efforts, even today, as shown by the recent lawsuit by the Department of Justice accusing Yale of discrimination in admissions against Asian American applicants. In another attack in 2019, a group including one of the drivers of Proposition 209 in California (who led the campaign to successfully but ill-advisedly eliminate any consideration of race in admissions to colleges in California) helped to sponsor an over 200-page piece of, in my opinion, pseudo scholarship. This document purported to show that the Black students who entered Yale College in the 1960s, and Yale itself, consciously pursued efforts which led to what they refer to as “Neo-segregation at Yale.” In brief, they argue that in efforts like collaborating on establishing the first African American studies major, expanding the admission of Black students, and in establishing the Afro-American Cultural Center, the Black students and Yale itself created a kind of resegregation of Yale.
That contention is unfounded. Those initiatives helped to create an environment where Blacks have flourished within Yale, partaking of aspects of the African-American experience, as well as the many other opportunities presented by the other offerings at Yale. While the African- American studies major has provided many students, of all races, opportunities to learn more about the Black experience, the charge that it contributes to resegregation is belied by the fact that the overwhelming majority of Black students major in subjects other than African-American studies, and they partake of, and are integral to, the high quality of education that Yale facilitates for all of its students. The Cultural Center, affectionately referred to by its users as “the House”, is a center for Black centric activities, but it is not a place where blacks spend the preponderance of their time at Yale. Black students, students of all races, and members of the Black community in New Haven, partake of many of the House’s activities at varying levels of engagement, and it remains there for those who desire or need to enjoy a Black-focused space from time to time.
Moreover, the objective evidence that Brewster had it right is indisputable. Evidence of his success was demonstrated early. He simultaneously began diversification of the student body while raising the average SAT score of the student body. As Kabaservice noted, “[t]he Class of 1970 entered with the highest SAT scores in Yale’s history.” Before then, it had been impossible to create the dynamic and diversified pool that Brewster had us swimming in during those years.
Black students educated in the new Yale environment have made significant contributions to the American society. Just thinking of students from our era, most of whom I have known personally, brings to mind, outstanding examples of success. In the world of business these include: Willard “Woody” Brittain, ‘70, who became the Chief operating officer of Price Waterhouse, then led the merger between it and Coopers & Lybrand, and became Vice-Chair of PriceWaterhouse Coopers; Vera Wells, ‘71, who became an Executive at NBC, and oversaw the creation and standardization of closed captioning for the network; Larry E. Thompson, ‘72, who served as General Counsel, then Vice-Chair of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation; Paul T. Williams, Jr. ‘74 became President of the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York, which is one of the largest issuers of tax-exempt bonds in the United States; James DeGraffenreidt, ‘74, who became the Chairman and CEO of WGL Holdings and Washington Gas Light; William Lighten, ‘86, who became Co-Head of Lehmann Brothers’ Asset Backed Securities Group; and Valentino Carlotti, ‘88, who became a Senior leader at Goldman Sachs, headed its operations in Brazil, and recently became a Partner at Brown Brothers Harriman, where he is Head of its Corporate Advisory and Banking Practice.
In the field of law, some of the Black Yale undergrads have included: Barrington “Danny” Parker, ‘65, who became a Federal District Court Judge, then a member of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals; Henry Jones, ‘67, who became the first Black Magistrate Judge in the Southern U.S.; Clyde Murphy, ‘70, who became Executive Director of the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and successfully argued an important race discrimination case in the United states supreme Court; Denise Page Hood ‘73, Chief Judge of the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, and George Daniels, ‘74 and Vernon Broderick, ‘85, who are Judges on the Federal District Court for the southern District of New York; and Wilhelmina Wright, ‘86, who has served on the Minnesota supreme Court as well as a Judge on the Federal District Court in Minnesota.
In the field of medicine, Carol Storey Johnson, ‘73, became the senior Associate Dean of Education at Weill Cornell Medical school; Richard Payne, ‘73, became an internationally recognized expert in pain management and palliative care, and a Professor of Medicine and Divinity at Duke University; David Nichols, ‘73, became vice Dean for Medical Education at Johns Hopkins school of Medicine and also served as President of the American Academy of Pediatrics; and although he and I have different views on political matters, Ben Carson, ‘73, became a renowned neurosurgeon, who held several leadership positions at the Johns Hopkins school of Medicine, and was the first to achieve several innovations in neurosurgery, including separating twins conjoined at the back of the head.
In education, Black Yale included: Armstead Robinson, ‘68, who became a professor of History at the University of Virginia, and consulted on the establishment of African-American studies programs at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Duke, the University of Virginia and other major institutions; Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., ‘73, a renowned historian, author and documentary filmmaker who is a professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard; and Lynda Darling Hammond, ‘73, who became a Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate school of Education, the President and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute, and the author of more than 25 books on education policy and practice.
In the Arts, George Lewis, ‘74, is a renowned composer, trombone player, and a pioneer of computer music, as well as a Professor and Cice Chair of the Department of Music at Columbia University; Anthony Davis, ‘75, is a Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego, and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Music; and Angela Bassett, ‘80, is a highly regarded actress.
In politics and government, our class includes Kurt Schmoke, ‘71, the first African-American elected secretary of a Yale Class, a Rhodes scholar, the first Black Mayor of Baltimore, Maryland, the Dean of the Howard University Law school, and currently President of the University of Baltimore. In his free time, Kurt also served on and became Senior Fellow of the Yale Corporation. Sheila Jackson Lee, ‘72, is a long-serving and influential Congresswoman from Houston, Texas; Gary Franks, ‘75, was the first African-American elected to Congress from Connecticut; Bisa Williams, ‘76, became a career foreign service officer and served as the U.S. Ambassador to Niger; and I’m especially pleased to mention my good friend, Jamie Harrison, ‘98, who, like me, is a mentee of Congressman Jim Clyburn, Majority Whip of the U.S. Congress. Jamie just completed a strong, but unsuccessful, run to become a U.S. senator from South Carolina.
Four of the Black alumni mentioned above, including our classmates Vera Wells and Kurt Schmoke, have also been awarded the Yale Medal, the highest award bestowed by the Alumni Association for outstanding service to the University. Other Black recipients of the Yale Medal include: Armstead Robinson, Woody Brittain, Victor Chears, ‘74 and Sheryl Negash, ‘82.
These are but some of the black undergraduate alumni who have made outstanding achievements. But equally important, a Yale education has spawned a whole cadre of Blacks who have achieved at whatever they have set themselves to accomplishing. They constitute part of a broad strata prepared by Yale (and similar institutions, including the historically Black colleges and universities), that have substantially expanded the number of Blacks working every day at making the USA, a more perfect union. I note that, for the sake of brevity, I have omitted other Black undergraduates who have done great things, and I have not included many outstanding Black graduates of Yale’s graduate and professional schools, or the terrific Black faculty members that Yale has recruited over the years. (I note that it is not a secret that Yale has too few Black faculty and must hire more in the future). As shown among those listed above, the admission of women to Yale College has also vastly enhanced achievement of the Yale education mission.
I have also largely confined my review to people of our generation, but today’s Black Yalies also achieve at high levels. Kahlil Greene Class of 2021 (who, I am told, spends significant time at the House) is a presence elsewhere at Yale. He just finished his term as the first African-American to serve as President of the Yale College Council, where he was the primary leader and liaison on behalf of all Yale students to the Administration. Greene was also recently awarded a Kerry Fellowship. Founded in 2017, the Kerry Fellowship program is run by former secretary of state John Kerry ‘66, as part of the Yale’s Jackson Institute of Global Affairs. The fellowship “allows students to collaborate and develop interdisciplinary research aimed at creating real-world policy solutions.” In this, I hear an echo reverberating through time, as the student founders of the Afro-American studies major in 1968 insisted that it be structured in an interdisciplinary fashion, so that it would be a part of, and have access to, all that Yale had to offer. Another of the five undergraduate recipients of the Kerry Fellowship this year was Teigist Taye, ‘22, a Black woman. In sum, the presence of Blacks at Yale has been additive, has become integral, and is not separative.
As members of the Class of 1971, it should be apparent to us that Yale’s approach has worked. Many in our class have friendships with people of all races in our class and the classes with which we overlapped during our Yale days; and others have developed relations with other alumni across racial lines aided by the approach to such relationships that we learned or developed at Yale. Those relationships have strengthened our lives and strengthened diversity and inclusion in the communities in which we live. The cultural competencies that we started to develop at Yale and, which have continued in our lives, have enabled us to be ambassadors and force multipliers for more racial harmony and greater inclusion in the society.
I understand that there are some good people in our class who believe that, in some respects, Yale has lost its way, and some of them believe that this relates in part to the efforts to diversify Yale. While I disagree with them, I know some of them and respect that they hold their views in good faith. I note that a university has traditionally been considered a perfect place to engage in the exchange and exploration of ideas and to address differences. My suggestion is that the current student body, Administration and Faculty (and those of us of the mind to engage), continue to work in good faith to challenge each other to work through the differences, recognizing that our time at Yale has given us the special tools needed to do so. This will not be achieved perfectly, but to paraphrase another well-known and positive sentiment, the arc of history bends toward better understanding as well as justice. Let’s continue on this journey together, honoring the legacy of Kingman Brewster, and in pursuit of achieving a more perfect union.