‘Let’s dig into the archives and tell the truth’: interrogating Yale’s connections to slavery

‘They didn’t want publicity, at first. They wanted to somehow see what the reaction was without it’ … David Blight. Photograph: Yale University Press

In 2019, the Yale historian David Blight won a Pulitzer prize, for his monumental biography of Frederick Douglass. In 2020, Blight was beginning work on his next book, about the life of the writer and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson. Then, his college president called.

“Peter Salovey called me up, in the depths of Covid, and said: ‘Would you lead, manage and write the history of Yale and slavery?’”