Zoom webinar registration link: https://bit.ly/4ifQIMd

A new exhibition on view from March 24 at the Yale Schwarzman Center, “Shining Light on Truth: Black Lives at Yale & in New Haven,” illuminates ongoing research that recovers the essential role of Black people throughout Yale and New Haven history. It celebrates Black community building, resistance, and resilience on campus and in New Haven.

The show includes 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 also features 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, are heralded in the show.

“Shining Light on Truth: Black Lives at Yale & in New Haven” showcases 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 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.

In this Mondays at Beinecke talk, lead designer David Jon Walker and lead curator Michael Morand, will discuss the exhibition, its evolution from the New Haven Museum show, and how it brings forth knowledge kept alive in archives and memory for many centuries—even when the dominant culture chose to ignore, bury, or forget.

Mondays at Beinecke online talks focus on materials from the collections and include an opening presentation at 4pm followed by conversation and Q & A beginning about 4:30pm until 5pm. Episodes are generally recorded and published on the library’s YouTube channel within a few weeks of original live program.