Business owner, abolitionist, service worker, father, community leader: John William Creed embodies the many strands of New Haven Black history in the 19th century. Thanks to a recent discovery in the Beinecke archives, we can now picture him even more clearly.

Taken in 1863, this portrait was included in the back of a photo album belonging to George St. John Sheffield (Yale B.A. 1863) of fellow members of the Russell Trust Association, better known as the secret society Skull and Bones. The pencil inscription reads “Old Creed, janitor.” Creed ended his career as steward of the storied society, after working as a caterer, ice cream maker, and custodian at Yale. Remembered for preparing the commencement dinners for Yale alumni for decades, Creed had been steward of the Calliopean Society, a literary society favored by Southern students, during the antebellum period.

Born on the island of St. Croix, Creed arrived in Connecticut in the midst of the age of revolutions, a time of transformation across the Americas. Slavery remained legal in both St. Croix and New Haven until 1848, but Creed was described as a free “man of color” in the records of Center Church, located on the Green, where he was made a member on the last day of 1820. That same year, the African Ecclesiastical Society was organized in New Haven; it became Temple Street Congregational Church, the city’s first independent Black church, today known as Dixwell Avenue UCC. Creed married Vashti Duplex there in 1830. Vashti, the city’s first Black educator, came from a family of leaders: her father had fought in the Revolutionary War, and her brother, Prince Duplex Jr., was the first clerk of the church.

John W. Creed himself was a leader in New Haven’s antislavery movement. In 1831, Black and white abolitionists gathered at the First Annual Convention of the People of Colour in Philadelphia, where the idea of establishing a college for Black men in New Haven was first proposed. Also at that meeting, Creed, along with Bias Stanley and Alexander C. Luca, was selected to serve on the provisional committee in New Haven to support the proposal. (Learn more about the 1831 college proposal, and its subsequent defeat, in the Beinecke film “What Could Have Been.”) That same year, Creed became a local agent selling The Liberator, the abolitionist newspaper recently founded by William Lloyd Garrison. The Liberator’s success depended on free Black people like Creed, who made up about 75 percent of subscribers.

Education was central to the family’s life and legacy. The eldest son of Vashti and John, Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed, graduated from the Lancasterian School, a private preparatory school, and then from Yale’s medical school in 1857—making him the first known Black graduate of Yale. (Richard Henry Greene also graduated from Yale College in 1857.) With the outbreak of the Civil War, he longed to join the fight for freedom, writing to the governor, “The hour has come, and ‘Old Connecticut’ God bless Her has spoken, and on every side we behold her colored sons rallying to the sounds of ‘Liberty and the Union.’” In January 1864, Dr. Creed received his commission as a surgeon in the Union Army, where he served for the duration of the Civil War before returning to his medical practice.

John W. Creed died in 1864, leaving a substantial estate and a library, the fate of the nation still unknown. He is buried in Grove Street Cemetery, along with his wife, son, and other family members—a marking of the secret society where he worked engraved on his obelisk.

To learn more

Curtis Patton, Ph.D., professor emeritus in the Yale School of Public Health, has worked for years to understand and elevate the story of Dr. Creed and his family. To learn more about Dr. Patton’s research and community work, read articles here and here.

You can read more about other early Black Yale students and Black employees in chapter 10 and the following interlude, written by Hope McGrath, in Yale and Slavery: A History, by David W. Blight with the Yale and Slavery Research Project (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), available as a free ebook.