NEW YORK, NY.- Yale University on Friday issued a formal apology for its early leaders’ involvement with slavery, accompanied by the release of a detailed history of the university’s connections to slavery and a list of what it said were initial steps to make some amends.

The announcement came more than three years after Yale announced a major investigation into the university’s connections to slavery, the slave trade and abolition, amid intense national conversations about racial justice set off by the murder of George Floyd. And it frames what the school’s leaders say will be a continuing commitment to repair.

“We recognize our university’s historical role in and associations with slavery, as well as the labor, the experiences and the contributions of enslaved people to our university’s history, and we apologize for the ways that Yale’s leaders, over the course of our early history, participated in slavery,” the university’s president, Peter Salovey, and the senior board trustee, Josh Bekenstein, said in a message to the university community.

“Acknowledging and apologizing for this history are only part of the path forward,” they continued. The university is also creating new programs to fund the training of public schoolteachers for its home city, New Haven, Connecticut, whose population is predominantly Black. And Yale will expand previously announced research partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities across the country, with a “significant new investment” to be announced in coming weeks.

Unlike Harvard, which in 2022 committed $100 million to a “Legacy of Slavery Fund,” Yale did not announce an amount for all its initiatives.

David W. Blight, the Yale historian who led the historical research, said in an interview that the purpose of the effort was not “to cast ugly stones at anybody,” but to present the university’s history honestly and unflinchingly.

“What this project shows, as others elsewhere have, is that universities can actually do this,” he said. “You can actually dig out your past, face it, write it up, make changes and make some degree of recompense.”

Yale, founded in 1701, is the latest institution of higher learning to formally address its historic entanglements with slavery, along with its role in maintaining the racial inequalities that continued long after abolition. In recent years, there have been similar efforts at dozens of schools including Brown, Harvard, William & Mary, the University of Virginia, Georgetown and Emory. Some of those efforts began as independent (and sometimes unwelcome) faculty-led projects and were only later embraced by administrators.

Slavery is hardly a new topic at Yale. In 2001, for Yale’s 300th anniversary, a group of graduate students issued an independent report on the school’s connections to slavery, which focused on the fact that many of its residential colleges were named after slaveholders. That effort was dismissed by some as a partisan hit job, written by graduate students connected with labor unions that were involved in a contentious battle with the university.

But race remained a highly charged topic at Yale, which has had an often contentious relationship with the local Black community. And the university’s record was thrown into the national spotlight with the debate over renaming Calhoun College, an undergraduate residential facility named after John C. Calhoun, the antebellum South Carolina senator and architect of Southern secession. (In 2017, it was renamed in honor of Grace Murray Hopper, a pioneering computer scientist who became a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy.)

Still, Blight, a leading scholar of the Civil War and the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Frederick Douglass, said that he was “stunned” when Salovey called him in September 2020, asking him to take on the project.

“This didn’t come from any yearning on the faculty,” he said. “It came from the president himself.”

Blight said he had agreed as long as he and the team he assembled could write a “real narrative history,” rather than just a report. He said that neither he nor any of the other Yale faculty members who contributed were paid. “We wanted to avoid the appearance that we were profiting off of Yale’s story,” he said.

They were given free rein in their research, and the university made no efforts to control what they wrote, he said.

The book, whose main findings are also presented on a website, begins with the early history of Connecticut, where in the 18th century roughly 50% of the economy was connected to trade with the West Indies, which depended on slavery.

One of the most fascinating parts, Blight said, was the antebellum period, when Yale students and faculty were on both sides of the slavery issue, and the university — which in the 20th century has tended to emphasize its abolitionist history — pursued a policy of “aggressive moderation,” as Blight calls it. “They just didn’t want to take a side until the 1850s,” he said.

That spirit was evident again in 1915, when Yale unveiled a Civil War memorial honoring fallen alumni from both the North and the South, without any distinction between their causes.

“The entire memorial designed to make them utterly equal,” Blight said. “There’s no victory, no defeat — just valor.”

Much of the Yale story echoes what researchers have found at peer institutions like Princeton, which also educated significant numbers of sons of Southern planters, and Brown, which was founded by a prominent New England slave-trading family.

Unlike some universities, most prominently Georgetown, Yale did not appear to have ever owned enslaved people. But the book fleshes out just how much Elihu Yale, for whom the school is named, profited from the slave trade.

The 448-page book, which will be provided free to local schools, libraries and other institutions, also devotes significant space to the history of New Haven’s Black community and its often fraught relationship with the university.

In 1831, as the book recounts, university leaders worked with local leaders to block a proposed college for Black youth, which the authors say would have been the first Black college in the country. In the Friday announcement, the university, which is the city’s largest employer, described the New Haven public education initiative as an effort to redress this “lost opportunity.”

At an event Friday in New Haven marking the book’s release, some attendees wore buttons honoring the 1831 college proposal, with the slogan “Knowledge Is Power.” One speaker, Charles Warner Jr., a New Haven resident and a member of the project’s working group, said he hoped the effort would answer the cry “for jobs and justice.”

The book, Warner said, is “a companion to the true Yale and slavery story, the story formed in flesh and written in blood, the story of people.”

During the research, Blight said, the group held meetings with alumni, students and community members at which the issue of redress was close to the surface.

“At least the second question was always ‘What are the reparations going to be?’” he said. (The word “reparation” does not appear in Yale’s announcement, which speaks instead of “forward-looking commitment.”)

At the Friday event, Salovey, who will retire this spring, acknowledged the 2001 graduate student report and also said the university would establish a committee to seek broad input for future efforts to make amends for Yale’s history.

He quoted the Rev. Alexander Crummell, a Black man who studied theology at Yale in the 19th century but was barred from registering as a student or speaking in class: “We read the future by the past.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.