Yale's Hidden, then Disappearing Portrait

Close on the heels of Brown University's comprehensive report on its connections to slavery and the Virginia House of Delegate's apology for its role in slavery, Yale University announced in February that it will take down a portrait of Elihu Yale. The portrait depicts a young slave (or perhaps it is a young Indian servant) wearing a metal collar, waiting on the great merchant and benefactor, whose contribution of books in the early eighteenth century led to the college being named after him.

The portrait has not quite been on public display. It has hung for years in a room where the Yale trustees meet and the controversy came to light only after a Yale student attending a press conference in the building wandered into the room and took a picture of it. Now Yale reports that it will take down the portrait and replace it with another, which does not have the reminder of the days of slavery.

Some may think this is caving into the forces of political correctness--as has been said of the University of Virginia's recent apology for its connections to slavery. However, the reason Yale gives for this action is that the portrait portrays Elihu Yale in the wrong light. For he was not a slave owner. The portrait is not being removed because it is a demeaning reminder of the time when Africans were kidnapped from their homes and brought to the new world to wait hand and foot on the wealthy-while wearing iron collars. Instead, Yale vice-President Lorinda Lorimer told the Yale Daily News the portrait is being removed because it is confusing. It implicates the beloved namesake of the university in the business of owning other humans and trading in them. He did not own anyone, though the presence of the portrait is an important reminder of the connections of the wealthy and powerful to slavery.

The act of removal of a rarely seen portrait is part of the process of forgetting. As we hide the portrait, we also make it easier to forget about the multiple connections between a university and the institution of slavery. What is surprising--indeed, shocking--to many is that universities were closely aligned with the institution to slavery. Those of us accustomed to hearing about dangerous, liberal university faculty may be surprised to hear about a fuller account of universities' history.

Yet, at many universities throughout the country from the colonial era into the opening of the Civil War in 1861, students were drawn from the slaveholding classes. Professors told those students that the institution of slavery was right, and the students in turn graduated to become defenders of slavery. In the 1830s, in the wake of Nat Turner's rebellion, the Virginia legislature contemplated a plan to gradually abolish slavery. In the wake of the failed proposal, William and Mary Professor Thomas R. Dew published a pamphlet reviewing the sentiments behind the legislature's actions. He concluded that slavery was not evil, but a blessing to the slaves. The pamphlet became one of the most popular defenses of slavery down to the Civil War.

Some in the North, like Brown University President Francis Wayland and Ralph Waldo Emerson, told students to reject outmoded institutions like slavery. Yet, not all Northern universities were hotbeds of antislavery radicalism. When the Amherst College president spoke at Yale in 1839, he laughed at Ralph Waldo Emerson's idea that students should be taught to think independently. In the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required northerners to return fugitive slaves to their southern owners, one prominent orator at Yale delivered urged support for law over conscience.

We must be careful in hiding our history; for we run the risk of forgetting the connections of great institutions, like Yale, to the past.