Connecticut

Did you know New Haven residents voted to kill a proposed "Negro College," planned by Yale graduate Simeon Jocelyn in 1831? Read more.




HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS on the new Citizens All website include this photograph, "Violet Evangeline Roberts with her mother, Ida, circa 1908." The interactive, educational website was set up by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery Resistance and Abolition. (COURTESY OF DIANE ROBINSON

AAPP says: There is a great article in the Hartford Courant - Courant.com regarding the politics of race in Connecticut - before and after slavery. Racism ran crazy during those days, as it does today (even though some blacks and most whites deny it). It's interesting to note some of the comments of those days regarding public education and blacks. Here is one of the many racist and ignorant ones:

"The colored people can never rise from their menial position in our country," wrote Andrew Judson, a federal judge and the school's next-door neighbor. "They are an inferior race of beings, and never can or ought to be recognized as the equals of whites."

It would be interesting today to take a look at Andrew Judson's grand children to see how many black woman have dated or marriaged a member of Andrew Judson family. OK I digress, check out the article.

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From Slaves To Citizens

By 1808, the United States officially rejected slavery, banning slave trading. As some forward-thinking whites and freed blacks would soon find out, it would take the country much longer to discard the notion of racial inequality.

Nowhere was that struggle more evident than in Connecticut. The incidents, at times, seem unthinkable in the state where the American abolitionist movement took hold: New Haven residents voting to kill a proposed "Negro College," planned by Yale graduate Simeon Jocelyn in 1831; the preaching of pastors - even Lyman Beecher - advocating to send blacks back to Africa; an 1834 mob attack on Prudence Crandall's integrated school for young women in Canterbury.

"The colored people can never rise from their menial position in our country," wrote Andrew Judson, a federal judge and the school's next-door neighbor. "They are an inferior race of beings, and never can or ought to be recognized as the equals of whites." More HERE and HERE