A few Black medical students attended YSM despite legal and institutional restrictions.
- By the end of the Civil War in 1865, three Black students had attended medical school at Yale. Two earned their MD degrees at Yale, while the third attended the medical school for one session before completing his MD degree at Bowdoin College in Maine.
- One student, Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed, is widely recognized as the medical school’s first Black graduate, but this is the first time the other two students have been identified as Black.
- Only Creed remained in the area and continued their relationship with the school, while almost no traces have been recovered of the other two students’ lives after they left Yale. The limited number of Black students and the lack of sources about their lives reflects both who Yale allowed to enroll and the limited role of the school in their later lives.
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In September 1831, a group of Black and white abolitionists publicized a plan to create a “College for Colored Youths” in New Haven. The city’s mayor, Dennis Kimberly, upon hearing the plan immediately called for a city meeting, and on Saturday, September 10, over 700 voters, all property-owning white males, gathered at the City Hall and voted almost unanimously against allowing the college to be established in their city. After headmistress Prudence Crandall admitted Black students to her Canterbury Female Boarding School in Canterbury, Connecticut in 1833, the state legislature enacted a law to prevent future attempts to educate Black people in Connecticut. The “Black Law” outlawed schools from teaching Black students from outside of the state unless local officials explicitly approved the plans, and that law would remain in force until 1838.
By 1804, all states north of Maryland had ratified constitutional prohibitions against slavery or enacted laws gradually abolishing slavery. Most of these northern states, however, passed laws restricting Black people’s civil rights in the early 1800s. In Pennsylvania, for instance, efforts to promote racial harmony and Black uplift in the late eighteenth century were followed by increasing racial discrimination in the 1820s and 30s. The Pennsylvania legislature considered, but ultimately did not pass, a bill to outlaw free African Americans from living in the state, while racial violence increased and Black people’s access to public education and other institutions was reduced. In Connecticut, the Black Law was passed under the 1818 state constitution that had limited voting to white people. Black people living in Connecticut only regained the right to vote in 1870, with the ratification of the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which banned states from denying men the right to vote based on their race. The hardships of living in the North as a free Black man led one former slave who had runaway from Georgia and then lived in Connecticut to write in his 1825 autobiography, “Those slaves who have kind masters are, perhaps, as happy as the generality of mankind…. I would advise no slave to leave his master.”
The Black Law prevented Yale from enrolling Black students from outside of Connecticut. It did not prevent it from enrolling local students, and the Yale Divinity School worked around the law by allowing a Black student to take courses but not officially enroll. The medical faculty, however, appear to have supported the prohibition. The year after New Haveners voted to quash the Black college, Professor of Chemistry, Pharmacy, Mineralogy, and Geology, Benjamin Silliman, gave a speech at the Center Church in New Haven supporting the suppression of the college and in favor of colonization. In his speech, Silliman professed support for Black education but claimed that the timing for the college was poor and that colonizing people of color out of the United States was necessary in order to convince the South to end slavery.
We have not yet uncovered direct evidence of other nineteenth-century medical faculty members’ position on slavery and emancipation, but colonization was a popular “gradualist” approach that appealed to New Englanders wanting to end slavery while avoiding a North-South conflict. The American Colonization Society (ACS) was founded in 1816 with the goal of removing free people of color from the United States, and it created the colony of Liberia in West Africa in 1822 as a place to settle free people and emancipated slaves. Many white slaveholders and abolitionists supported the ACS according to their shared belief that Black people could not be integrated into U.S. society because they believed stereotypes that free Black people were lazy criminals. Abolitionist supporters of colonization, such as Silliman, feared what would happen if the free Black population would continue to grow in the North and also hoped that providing an outlet for freed enslaved people would encourage enslavers to emancipate their slaves. The majority of Black Americans almost immediately rejected colonization and its underlying goal of racial exclusion. By the late 1820s, some white abolitionists joined Black activists in denouncing colonization and began pushing for greater racial justice and inclusion. The position of these “radical” abolitionists, however, made most white Americans, including many abolitionist northerners, uncomfortable because the demand for “immediate” emancipation could be interpreted as a call for violence or an attack on private property rights.
The school of medicine did not, as far as we know, admit any Black students or allow Black students to attend lectures until 1854, even though Connecticut opinion against slavery strengthened in the late 1830s. The Black Law was repealed in 1838 and that year the Connecticut legislature passed symbolic measures against admitting new slave states and in favor of ending slavery in the District of Columbia. In 1839, the landing of the slave ship Amistad in New Haven further spurred local antislavery activism. The enslaved human cargo of the Amistad had successfully revolted and demanded that the surviving sailors return them to Africa. The sailors instead steered the ship north, where it was captured by a U.S. revenue cutter and brought into New Haven harbor. The capture of the Amistad led to competing court cases over the freedom and ownership of the previously enslaved people onboard, ultimately leading to an 1841 Supreme Court case grating the Africans their freedom. Once the case was settled, however, white opinion in New Haven about slavery had changed little.
It took the outbreak of violence in Kansas over slavery to change local opinion, including those of the medical faculty, and spur change. North-South antagonism over slavery had been growing since the 1820 Missouri Crisis, when southern members of congress refused to admit Maine as a state unless Missouri was admitted as a slave state. The Compromise that resulted admitted both states but included a prohibition on slavery in other western lands north of 36°30′ north latitude, Missouri’s southern border. Violence erupted in 1854 when the Missouri Compromise was broken after the U.S. Congress passed the Kansas–Nebraska Act, organizing the Kansas and Nebraska Territories and allowing a popular vote to determine whether slavery would be legal in them. In Kansas, widespread electoral fraud by proslavery Missourians crossing into Kansas to vote led to the establishment of two competing legislatures and extensive violence between pro- and antislavery activists over which was the true government. This outbreak of violence, popularly called “Bleeding Kansas,” enflamed New England abolitionists, even those who had previously taken a conservative antislavery approach. Bleeding Kansas directly contributed to the breakdown of the U.S. political party system that had contained conflicts over slavery, paving the way for the emergence of the Republic party, the election of Abraham Lincoln as president, the secession of the southern states, and the Civil War.
More immediately, Bleeding Kansas drove John Brown to antislavery violence. Brown, who grew up in Torrington, Connecticut, and already held radical antislavery views, moved to Kansas in response to the Kansas–Nebraska Act and became the face of violent abolitionist action when he and his family murdered five proslavery men in retaliation for the killing of Brown’s son in 1856. At the time, Brown was reported to have said “I have only a short time to live—only one death to die, and I will die fighting for this cause. There will be no peace in this land until slavery is done for. . . . I will carry the war into Africa [meaning the South].” Three years later, Brown and his supporters attacked the U.S. arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, as the beginning of a foiled plot to arm southern slaves for open revolt. The assault at Harpers Ferry consolidated anti-Union sentiment and feelings of sectional unity in the South, acting for the South much as Bleeding Kansas had for abolitionist northerners.
Some New Haveners decided to immigrate to Kansas, like Brown, in support of keeping slavery out of the territory by increasing the antislavery vote and preventing proslavery Missourians from interfering. In March 1856, a fundraising event was held in the North Church on the New Haven Green to support a group of sixty men planning to immigrate, and attendees pledged rifles to arm them, though whether these weapons were intended to be used offensively or defensively was left unstated. The formerly hesitant Professor Silliman pledged the first rifle,. After a Yale junior pledged one on behalf of his class, Silliman challenged the other classes to follow suit, leading the senior class to pledge a rifle as well. Future Yale medical professors Charles Ives and Stephen G. Hubbard also made contributions, pledging three and one rifles, respectively.
The explosive antislavery reaction to Bleeding Kansas that affected even conservative abolitionists like Silliman also likely led to institutional changes at the Yale School of Medicine and contributed to Yale accepting its first Black medical student. Courtlandt Van Rensselaer Creed, a local whose father was a Yale janitor and caterer and whose mother was New Haven’s first Black school teacher, began classes in the fall of 1854. After his first session at Yale, Creed wrote a letter to famed Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Creed expressed to Douglass that before applying, “I had my fears and doubts as to whether I would be admitted at ‘Yale.’ Knowing that prejudice against color was somewhat apparent, in time past.” Creed continued, explaining that despite his fears, “Both in college and out of its walls… I never experienced any other than the most polite treatment from my fellow class-mates.” Harvard had admitted three Black students in 1850, but white student outcry forced the faculty to not reenroll the Black students after their first session, preventing them from completing their education at Harvard. Creed may have been contrasting his experience with those first Black medical students at Harvard; or he may have been drawing on his experiences growing up in New Haven; or perhaps his doubts about being about being admitted to Yale included a bit of both. Whatever the root of Creed’s fears, he apparently was politely received by other Yale medical students. Whether white Yale students were more simply more welcoming than Harvard’s or Bleeding Kansas had changed white medical student opinion in general is impossible to say, but Creed would go on to write his thesis “On the Blood,” earning his MD degree in 1857.
Creed later joined the Connecticut Volunteer Regiment as an assistant surgeon during the Civil War, and after the war he practiced medicine in New York and Connecticut. When U.S. President James Garfield was shot in 1881, the presidents’ doctors contacted Creed about how to find the bullet. Creed was admitted to the Connecticut Medical Society in 1885 and died in New Haven in 1900. He is buried in Grove Street Cemetery.
While Creed was taking courses at the medical school, another Black resident of New Haven was earning his bachelor’s degree at the College. Richard Henry Greene (sometimes spelled “Green”), whose father was a New Haven bootmaker, matriculated in 1853 the year before Creed. Greene and Creed both graduated with their respective degrees in 1857. Greene would go on to practice medicine, but rather than continue his education in his hometown at Yale, Greene attended Dartmouth Medical School, where he earned his MD degree in 1864. While earning his degree during the Civil War, he also entered the Navy as an acting assistant surgeon. We have not found any explanation from Greene about why he left New Haven for Dartmouth, but his life’s trajectory can give us some clues. Greene married a woman from Vermont during his stint in the Navy, and they settled in Hoosick, New York, after the war. The 1870 census lists them both as white, and Greene may have left New Haven where his family was well known in order to pass for white. We cannot know this for sure, given that the census workers often recorded what they assumed was a person’s race. However, at least one of Greene’s surviving descendants did not know until recently that she had a Black ancestor. Alternatively, Greene may have also gone to Dartmouth because it had a reputation for educating Black students. The first Black student enrolled at the college in 1775, and Edward Mitchell earned his AB degree at Dartmouth in 1828. American-born Liberian Samuel Ford McGill earned the first MD granted by a U.S. medical school to a Black student from Dartmouth in 1839, and the college had awarded at least four AB degrees and eight MD degrees to Black students by the time Greene enrolled.
In 1856, while Creed and Greene were taking classes at Yale, the ACS newspaper, The African Repository, shared a request from “Dr. J. S. Smith of Buchanan,” Liberia. Smith requested “that two medical students, Henry W. Foster and Wm. Henry Ealbeck, now with him, may have the opportunity to attend upon medical lectures in the United States during the next year.” It would take a few years, but those two students would enroll at Yale in the fall of 1859 as the school’s previously unrecognized second and third Black medical students.
James Skirving Smith had migrated to Liberia from South Carolina in 1833 as a child before returning to the United States to earn his medical degree from Berkshire Medical Institute in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In 1856, he became the Liberian secretary of state and would later go on to briefly serve as the country’s president in the 1870s. U.S. medical schools before the Civil War generally only enrolled Black students who stated they intended to emigrate, so Smith had been allowed to attend medical school in the United States because he was already living in Liberia. Most of the Black Dartmouth graduates mentioned earlier emigrated, and at least two of the first three Black students Harvard Medical School first enrolled in 1850, before scorning them, had agreed with the Massachusetts Colonization Society to practice in Liberia after graduation. Smith hoped his two students might be accepted into a U.S. medical school because they were Liberians, and the increased activism of Yale faculty in response to Bleeding Kansas likely contributed to the medical school enrolling Black Liberians as well as Black Americans.
Smith’s two Liberian proteges, Ealbeck and Foster, both enrolled at Yale in 1859, but only Foster graduated. Foster took classes in 1859 and 1860, before earning his MD degree with a thesis entitled “Dissertation on intermittent fever of West Africa” in 1861. His graduation marked just the second time the medical school granted a degree to a Black student. After a winter session at Yale, Ealbeck instead enrolled at the Medical School of Maine at Bowdoin College in the Spring of 1860 before earning his MD from Bowdoin in 1860 with a thesis on “Lethargus or the Sleepy Disease,” which was “Known in West Africa.”
Both Ealbeck and Foster wrote theses about diseases associated with the Liberian climate, and both focused on specific behaviors and local conditions as causes rather than suggest that the Liberian climate itself was irredeemably insalubrious. Their descriptions of these diseases balanced understandings of health as dependent on broad categorizations of climate with an individual’s behaviors and specific location, and they, like other eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century physicians, were influenced by their personal experiences and politics in choosing what elements to stress. Ealbeck, for instance, wrote his thesis on Lethargus and began by commenting on how different climates and conditions caused different diseases. He specifically pointed out diseases that were more common on cooler climates that were considered healthier than equatorial Africa. He wrote, “Phtyses, Scirrhus, and the more dangerous fevers is [sic] by far more frequent in the Temperate climate.” At the same time, though, Ealbeck maintained that “diseases of the liver Kidneys Leprosy and Lethargus, More frequently make their appearance in warm or hot climates.” However, he also separated the Liberians from their neighboring native Africans, adding the caveat that Lethargus “more frequently Makes its appearance among the aboriginal portion of the African population, but is also seen occasionally in the more civilized Negro districts as for example the Liberian Settlements.” Ealbeck went on to describe the “the predisposing causes” of Lethargus as “Sedentary habits, unwholesome and indigestible vegetable food peculiar influences of the climate, and the prolonged action of Malaria acting upon constitutions thus disposed.” Focusing on personal habits and local differences helped Ealbeck make the case that Liberia was not blanketly unhealth, and he again associated Lethargus with the native Africans more than the Liberians, explaining that he believed “the small thatched huts, of the African, from their want of capacity and free ventilation” “accounts for its more frequent appearance in the uncivilized Negro districts.”
Foster, writing on intermittent fever, attributed differential susceptibility to the disease to individual behavior rather than to race. He admitted that “the face of the country [West Africa] is of a nature generally found to be productive of precarious [??] disease” and that the Liberian settlement was located “upon tolerably rich land” where the disease immigrants to Liberia experienced was “delayed but not materally [sic] lessened in its severity and duration.” Foster continued on, however, to argue that personal behavior could help protect people from the diseases of the climate, explaining that fever “occurs after an exposure to the direct rays of the sun, sitting in wet clothes after a rain, the weting [sic] not proving as injurious if the person is able to obtain shelter and dry clothes, severe and long continued great mental excitement.” Additionally, Foster described “sedentary habits, intemperance, a change of residence, constipation, and in females that condition of the system that attends upon the menstrual flow” as “Predisposing causes.” While perhaps less positive about the Liberian climate than Ealbeck, Foster joined him in describing how personal behaviors could protect people, rendering the climate a bit less threatening. These arguments that specific behaviors could overcome the dangers of the West African climate fit with those made by British and U.S. supporters of colonization who admitted that the African continent was generally unhealthy but also argued that the danger could be mitigated by temperate living, especially for Black people believed to be naturally more suited for hot climates.
Unfortunately, we know almost nothing about Ealbeck and Foster after they completed their degrees. According to the December 1860 edition of The African Repository, Ealbeck returned to Liberia after giving a speech to the Annual Meeting of the Vermont Colonization Society, where he praised the colonization project. According to the Repository, Ealbeck “said, he was thankful that there is one place on earth where the colored man may have peace, and that for that place under providence, he believed the race were indebted to the friends of Colonization. God made Africa for the black man, and the black man for Africa.” The next trace we have of Ealbeck is the 1889 General Catalogue of Bowdoin College and the Medical School of Maine that reported that him deceased but did not include the date, place of residence, or place of death. We have yet to uncover any information about Foster’s life after graduating from Yale. The African Repository did not publish an announcement of Foster’s return to Liberia in either 1861 or 1862 as they had for Ealbeck in 1860, and he may remained in the United States. While a handful of Black students attended Yale in the 1850s and 1860s, only Creed continued to live locally. Whether this was because of local discrimination, better opportunities elsewhere, or simply personal choice, Yale’s other early Black students quickly moved away.. Yale College graduate Greene opted to attend Dartmouth medical school rather than stay in New Haven. Ealbeck finished his degree at Bowdoin after one session at Yale before returning to Liberia, while we have recovered no information about Foster, the other Liberian, after he graduated from Yale. The Medical Institution would go on to graduate two more Black medical students in the 1870s and then eight more in the last twelve years of the nineteenth century. Sometime in the early twentieth century, Yale adopted a strict, unwritten policy against admitting Black students, which lasted until the 1940s, and the medical school forgot about its early Black graduates until Daryl Keith Daniels, himself a Black Yale medical student, wrote his own 1991 MD thesis on their history.
Further reading
- Mark Alden Branch, “History, Found,” Yale Alumni Magazine, April 2023, https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/5622-history-found
- “Dartmouth Historical Black Alumni Database,” Blacks@Dartmouth 1775 to 1960, https://badahistory.net/DBlist.php
- Kerry L. Falvey, Medicine at Yale: The First 200 Years (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University in association with Yale University Press, 2010).
- Leonard W. Johnson, Jr., “History of the Education of Negro Physicians,” Journal of Medical Education 42, no. 5 (May 1967): 439-46.
- Diana Moraco, “Prudence Crandall Fights for Equal Access to Education,” Connecticut History | a CTHumanities Project, September 9, 2021, https://connecticuthistory.org/prudence-crandall-fights-for-equal-access-to-education
- Judith Schiff, “The Life of Richard Henry Green,” Yale Alumni Magazine, June 2014, https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/3875-the-life-of-richard-henry-green
- Robert Austin Warner, New Haven Negroes, a Social History (New York: Arno Press, 1969).
- “Yale Celebrates 150th Anniversary of First African American Graduate,” YaleNews, May 30, 2007, https://news.yale.edu/2007/05/30/yale-celebrates-150th-anniversary-first-african-american-graduate
