African American Studies at Beinecke Library

Collections, events, and news from the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters.

Portrait from library collection featured in lavish Pulitzer Prize–winning opera “Omar”
May 15, 2023
The circa 1850 ambrotype (a positive image on glass) is from the library’s Randolph Linsly Simpson African American Collection, James Weldon Memorial Collection. It is one of only three known portraits of the man, who is identified in a handwritten caption as “Uncle Moreau, a slave of great notoriety.”
Yale Camerata to celebrate African American history and culture
April 27, 2023
As they prepared for the performance, the Camerata’s members had the opportunity to view materials at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, part of the Yale University Library, which highlight Hughes’ and Bonds’ friendship and their long-running artistic collaboration. The choir members took turns leafing through seven folders of correspondence between the poet and the composer, an archive that contains engrossing evidence of their intimate friendship.
Archive illuminates New Haven’s Bias Stanley, a 19th-century civil rights advocate
April 18, 2023
Papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library shed new light on the lives of Bias and Margaret Stanley, stalwarts of New Haven’s Black community in the early 1800s.
Uncovering the link between 'Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing' and Yale's historic Beinecke Collection (Connecticut Public Radio/WNPR)
March 23, 2023
"Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," also known as the Black National Anthem, was adopted by the NAACP and prominently used as a rallying cry during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This year, the song was performed at the Super Bowl by Waterbury native Sheryl Lee Ralph, an actress on “Abbott Elementary.” That’s not the song’s only tie to Connecticut.
History, found. Richard Henry Greene was the first Black graduate of Yale College. Now, we can see him.
March 1, 2023
Nine years ago, a researcher at an auction house reminded Yale of a forgotten piece of its history: Yale College’s first Black graduate, Richard Henry Greene of the Class of 1857. We wrote about the rediscovery of Greene’s accomplishment at the time, but one thing was missing. We could find no pictures of Greene. Now, we have a face to go with the name, thanks to Greene’s great-great-granddaughter, who recently shared with the Yale Alumni Magazine two tintype images of him in his Civil War uniform. (He was an assistant surgeon in the US Navy during the war.) They are the only known images of Greene. What’s more, Greene’s descendant is able to shed a bit more light on the life of this pathbreaking alumnus.
Suffragist, Activist, Journalist: The Incredible Life of Jersey City’s Own Ella Barksdale Brown (The Hoboken Girl)
February 27, 2023
Her involvement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Circle for Negro War Relief, the New Jersey Civil Rights Bureau, and the National Association of Colored Women led to her friendships with such pioneering civil rights leaders as W.E.B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, Paul Robeson, and James Weldon Johnson. Archive boxes in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library hold letters of well wishes, sympathy, news, and greetings between Ella and her illustrious peers.
In "What Could Have Been," New Haven's Past Haunts Its Present (Arts Paper)
February 23, 2023
The year is 2023. Just beyond East and Water Streets, the nation’s first Historically Black College is gearing up for its 192nd anniversary. Balloons bob in the breeze outside. Buildings reach into the blue New Haven sky. Gulls cry and cackle above the water, and sound like they are laughing. All day, the nation’s most prominent Black scholars file in and out of the campus buildings, holding a history that is nearly two centuries old. Except, their path to that day never happened. The year is 2023, and the space is just an ocean of asphalt and road, with a labyrinth of highway winding above. It didn’t have to be this way.
Doc Reveals The New Haven HBCU That Could Have Been (New Haven Independent)
February 23, 2023
On Wednesday night at the New Haven Museum, New Haveners had a chance to learn, together, about an uncomfortable truth: that, in 1831, New Haven’s white community leaders overwhelming rejected a serious proposal to found what would have been the first U.S. Black college, on the land where the interchange of I‑95 and I‑91 now exists. That story is told in What Could Have Been: America’s First HBCU, a short and powerful documentary written by Tubyez Cropper and Michael Morand of the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library and directed and edited by Cropper. Released in April 2022, the film on Wednesday night enjoyed a robust audience at the museum on Whitney Avenue dedicated to New Haven’s history.
Film explores how New Haven almost became home of the first Black college in the U.S. (New Haven Register)
February 13, 2023
Tubyez Cropper, and Michael Morand, community engagement program manager and director of community engagement at the Beinecke Library at Yale, respectively, joined forces to create a documentary about the 1831 proposal for a Black college in New Haven
Yale documentary explains how New Haven had a chance to become home to the first HBCU (Fox 61)
February 8, 2023
“What Could Have Been” is a new documentary from the Beinecke Library at Yale University that explores the Elm City in 1831 and the group of freed Black people and white abolitionists that formed a proposal to establish a Black college in the city.