A new website now makes it easier to learn about Black student trailblazers at Yale. Shining Light on Truth: Early Black Students at Yale is a web-based research tool dedicated to understanding and uplifting the first generations of Black students at the university and their contributions beyond Yale. Completely free and accessible to the public, the site allows users to search students by name, places lived, Yale affiliation, and more. In addition to information about their Yale attendance, student profiles include demographic information, publications, and narrative biographies based on research undertaken by Beinecke staff and student workers.
This is the first comprehensive research project dedicated to researching early Black students in Yale’s history. So far, Beinecke researchers have identified over 240 Black students who attended the university between 1830 and 1940. Over time, Black students attended Yale College, Sheffield Scientific School, the graduate school, and the divinity, law, medical, art, drama, and music schools. After leaving Yale, they made their mark on a wide variety of professions and occupations; led religious, political, civic, and artistic organizations; and authored books, pamphlets, and articles across a wide range of disciplines and genres.
Research into Yale’s nineteenth-century Black students accelerated as part of the Yale and Slavery Research Project, and early findings appear in chapter 10 of Yale and Slavery: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024). Profiles of over 200 early Black student pioneers, along with 60 framed black-and-white photographs, were presented as part of the exhibition, Shining Light on Truth: New Haven, Yale, and Slavery, at the New Haven Museum (February 2024-March 2025). A new exhibition, Shining Light on Truth: Black Lives at Yale & in New Haven, on view now through March 2026 at the Yale Schwarzman Center, features dozens of these historic photographs.
The Shining Light on Truth website is an initiative of the community engagement team at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, with leadership provided by Jennifer Coggins, Community Engagement Archivist, and Hope McGrath, Research Coordinator for Yale, New Haven, and Connecticut History. Research is ongoing, and we welcome inquiries, feedback, and new leads. If you have questions or would like to share information about a Black student who attended Yale before 1940, please write to beinecke.library@yale.edu.
The website team included John Baldo, Trip Kirkpatrick ’93, and Martin Lovell (Yale Library IT); Jennifer Coggins, Mohamed Diallo ’26, Simone Felton ’25, B Laboy DIV ’26, Hope McGrath, Michael Morand ’87 DIV ’93 (Beinecke Library Community Engagement); Ken Albers and Nelson Amaya (Omeka); Kayla Shipp and Gavi Levy Haskell (Yale Digital Humanities Lab); and designer David Jon Walker ’23 MFA.