Serendipity

From the Chicago Defender, August 3, 1946...

Yale Culture Unsullied By Use In New Haven

NEW HAVEN, CONN -- The sweet light of reason emanating from the accumulation of culture at Yale university, seems well confined behind the ivy walls, according to a survey of race relations and community conditions in this city which is the home of the university.

Negroes find that "race prejudice is very subtle and it slaps you in the face when you least expect it."

Rev. R. A. G. Foster, pastor of the 126-year-old Varick African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, said that Yale seems to exert little influence on city politics and has only refined racial prejudice.

Housing for the 7,500 Negro residents is bad, they testify, and has been since World War I.

The percentage of Negroes in skilled and professional jobs is inordinately small. There are four school teachers, two social workers in state employ, two clerks in city offices and three or four personnel workers in industry.

There are three policemen, no city firemen, no bus or trolley car drivers.

"Integration Genuine"

The Winchester Arms company, however, employs 900 colored workers or about 17 per cent of the laboring force. The publicity director claims that "integration is genuine."

Prices, rents and accomodations are major problems. Mayor William Celentano, elected "by an Italian awakening" has set up a "Fair Rent Committee" but it has been handicapped by lack of state action.

Sections of New Haven, especially that near Yale's New Haven hospital, "are cesspools of disease and crime" according to the mayor.

To examine the school system and make recommendations for improvements, he revealed, a university expert has been called in. He is Dr. Julian Butterworth--of Cornell University.

We'll skip the obvious and cheap correlations and instead attempt to historicize this document. This is a portrait of a New Haven still relatively untouched by the later throes of the Second Great Migration, which would see the African-American population of the city surge by the end of the 1960s. This New Haven has not yet experienced the upheavals of Richard Lee's urban renewal projects and "Kremlin on the Green." And this is also written from a genteel perspective apparently sympathetic to the proto-"culture of poverty" discourse of "disease" and "crime" infesting the Hill and Oak Street which could only be expunged by the razing of an entire working-class neighborhood and its replacement with a highway to nowhere, which would only intensify housing woes into the 1960s and 1970s. (Also note the reference to Varick AME Zion, now David Lee's church, which i also found a great deal of mention of in the notes in the back of the Baltimore Afro-American during the war years. This isn't surprising, as the church, as the article notes, has been around and important for a long time.) I find this article interesting because it fills in some of the blanks that Deborah Elkin refers to in her dissertation, suggesting not only what kinds of discrimination the few black workers at Yale faced on the job, (the most prestigious were often bartenders in frat-houses) but also how the middle class African-American luminaries of the city understood the university's role in city politics entering into the Lee years, in which the university would play a very direct role in much of the new cartography and dislocation.