YBAA History

Black students, staff, faculty, and New Haven residents have stewarded Black Yale for generations, each group carrying it for as long as they were in New Haven and then passing it on to the next.

The Yale Black Alumni Association developed out of a planning retreat held in January 2008 at the Afro-American Cultural Center — the House — and facilitated by Mark Dollhopf, then executive director of the Yale Alumni Association. It was a joint effort between YAA and Black alumni, under the direction of Shared Interest Group director Nicholas Roman Lewis ’93.

YBAA was formed to serve, to involve, and to inform the Yale community of Black alumni: to build networks, promote mentoring opportunities, create initiatives, and execute programs that connect alumni to each other, to their communities, to current Black students and faculty, and to Yale.

Representing four decades of alumni, the retreat attendees unanimously voted to create an organized entity. Immediately following the retreat, task forces were formed to survey alumni as well as current students for input on the mission statement, to research the legal formation of a nonprofit organization, and to benchmark Black alumni associations at peer institutions.

In September 2010, YBAA held its first annual retreat in New Haven, following the organizational work performed by the officers selected earlier that year. The gathering of approximately twenty alumni and staff marked the official launch of both the YBAA and its National Advisory Council, composed of non-voting board members who provide assistance and guidance as needed.

The activities surrounding that 2010 meeting resulted in the organization’s incorporation, the adoption of bylaws, an official logo, an annual calendar of meetings and events, relationship building among members of the YBAA and the NAC as well as with leaders of YAA and the House, and the establishment of initiatives for membership and development, programming, communications, campus relations, and regional chapters.

Janifer Lighten ’83 served as YBAA’s founding president. The first chapters formed around the launch, among them YBAA-CT, whose proximity to campus made it a link between the association and the students, faculty, and staff still in New Haven.

Since 2010 YBAA has organized, sponsored, and co-sponsored events — Yale Day of Service projects, the Higher Education Initiative, the Summer Institute of the Arts, the Summer Service Project, Y-Apply, and regional welcome receptions for incoming Yale students — in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Ghana, Los Angeles, New Haven, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

Early programs of note include:

• The Summer Institute of the Arts, which offered classes in musicology, music theory, and critical listening alongside master classes such as Careers in Music and Technology, in Los Angeles and the Bronx in 2010, 2011, and 2012.
• The Higher Education Initiative (HEI), which gave current Yale undergraduates the opportunity to meet, mentor, and encourage young people toward college, while helping identify prospective applicants for Yale and other colleges and universities. HEI let YBAA carry the message that college is for everyone.
• The YBAA Book Award, an annual scholarship for academic achievement formally called the Yale Black Alumni Association Achievement Award, which began at the Edward Brooke Charter School in Boston.
• Day of Service projects, often though not exclusively centered on education and mentorship, many of which grew beyond the single day or repeated annually.

Janifer Lighten died in February 2012, two years into the organization she had helped found and had led from the start. Alumni who had been there from the beginning kept it going: Sheryl L. Carter ’82, C’Ardiss Gardner Gleser ’08, and Regina Bain ’98, MFA ’01 each served in the years that followed. Albert Mosley ’99 S.T.M. was appointed chair and president in 2016.

The pace of national programming slowed in the years after 2017, and then the pandemic stopped nearly all of it. YBAA’s calendar had always been built out of gatherings, so when gatherings ended the national organization went largely dormant. The bylaws adopted in 2010 continued to serve as guidance for the growth and governance of the organization.

What did not go quiet was the community. The 2020 Excellence Award was given for a series of virtual gatherings YBAA convened during COVID quarantine and after the murder of George Floyd — alumni who needed each other, finding each other on a screen because there was nowhere else to go.

Two people kept the association itself viable in those years. Regina Bain, then serving on YAA’s Board of Governors, stepped up and led revitalization efforts through the pandemic until a more formal relaunch could be organized. Nicholas Roman Lewis, by then a senior director at YAA, spent those years advocating for Black Yalies inside the alumni association and helping ensure YBAA’s relaunch and sustainability.

On June 29, 2023, Black alumni convened at the Yale Club of New York City for Sustainable Legacy: A Family Conversation — a reception, keynote address, facilitated panel, and group discussion that YAA billed plainly as relaunching the Yale Black Alumni Association. The subject was how Black Yale alumni could collaborate to support their own community, navigate the greater Yale community, and serve the greater Black community.

What followed was rebuilding rather than a single event. An interim board was convened to carry the organization through the relaunch, including Ralph Dawson ’71 as interim president and Ivy Onyeador ’11 as interim vice president. Across 2024 and 2025 the association seated a new national board, stood up committees, formalized its processes, reincorporated and secured 501(c)(3) status, and supported chapters back into activity — Atlanta reactivated in November 2025, Boston just after the Yale–Harvard game that month.

At the 2025 YAA Assembly, YBAA received a Board of Governors Excellence Award for that revitalization. Former board presidents Ralph Dawson ’71 and Sheryl L. Carter ’82 accepted it on the organization’s behalf.

YBAA today is an independent, all-volunteer 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in New Haven and an official Shared Interest Group of the Yale Alumni Association. It serves a network of more than 11,000 Black alumni of Yale College and Yale’s graduate and professional schools, through more than ten chapters and a national program of virtual and in-person events. Membership is free, and every Black Yale alum already has it.

Some of the through-lines are personal. Ivy Onyeador ’11 sat on the inaugural board in 2010 as its student delegate and is YBAA’s National President today. Adrienne Lighten ’10 — Janifer Lighten’s daughter — serves as National Secretary and helps lead the New York chapter, in the city where the relaunch was convened. Carl Horton ’90 served as national treasurer during YBAA’s first decade and is its National Parliamentarian now.

YAA has recognized YBAA’s work with Excellence Awards:

• 2011 — Outstanding Shared Interest Group, for the inaugural year theme “Reconnect with Yale through Leadership and Service”; SIG Day of Service Award, with special mention of the Los Angeles and Seattle chapters
• 2012 — Outstanding Shared Interest Group, for growth in chapter development and participation and a continued emphasis on public service; SIG Day of Service Award, spotlighting the Los Angeles chapter
• 2013 — SIG Day of Service Award, spotlighting the Seattle chapter
• 2016 — Outstanding Shared Interest Group, spotlighting the Chicago chapter
• 2017 — Outstanding Student Engagement Award, spotlighting the Higher Education Initiative; Outstanding Large Day of Service, spotlighting the Los Angeles chapter
• 2020 — Excellence Award for virtual programming, for a series of gatherings held during COVID quarantine and after the murder of George Floyd
• 2025 — Board of Governors Excellence Award, for the revitalization of the organization