Shining Light on Truth: Black Lives at Yale & in New Haven 

A new exhibition to be installed at the Schwarzman Center, “Shining Light on Truth: Black Lives at Yale & in New Haven,” will illuminate ongoing research that recovers the essential role of Black people throughout Yale and New Haven history. The exhibition puts back at the center of local storytelling people who have always been central to local history. It celebrates Black community building, resistance, and resilience on campus and in New Haven.

The show will include nearly one hundred images of Yale’s earliest Black students from the 1800s and early 1900s, many of whom had deep New Haven connections. The Schwarzman exhibition will also feature compelling reproductions of photographs of New Haveners who were custodians of Yale. The Luke, Grimes, Creed, Park, and Bassett families, among the many people key to founding and sustaining Yale, will be heralded in the show.

“Shining Light on Truth: Black Lives at Yale & in New Haven” will showcase the proposal, made and thwarted in 1831, to build a Black college in New Haven. It will also highlight the successful efforts of Black students in the 1960s to establish the Afro-American Cultural Center and Afro-American Studies at Yale.

This exhibition brings forth knowledge kept alive in archives and memory for many centuries—even when the dominant culture chose to ignore, bury, or forget. It extends the work of the Yale and Slavery Research Project and follows from the exhibition, “Shining Light on Truth: New Haven, Yale and Slavery,” at the New Haven Museum from February 16, 2024 – March 1, 2025.

The exhibition team includes David Jon Walker ’23 MFA, lead designer, and Michael Morand ’87 ’93 M.Div., lead curator, with Timeica Bethel ’11, Rob Brown, Jennifer Coggins, Tubyez Cropper, Mohamed Diallo ’26, Regina Mason, Hope McGrath, Carlynne Robinson, and Charles Warner, Jr.