Yale Black Alumni Network (YBAN)

Letter to President Levin from "Concerned Members of YBAN"

On Wednesday, November 14, 2007, Associate Dean and Director of the Afro-American Cultural Center, Pamela Y. George, read aloud the attached letter to a packed crowd of Yale students and other attendees at Woolsey Hall who were there for a rally in response to the recent spate of racist incidents on campus.

Dean George read this letter, addressed to President Richard Levin, on behalf of concerned members of YBAN, a spontaneously self-organized subset of this 11-year old alumni group who felt compelled to share their collective voice in solidarity with students and other Yale community members concerned about the racist graffiti prominently scrawled on a wall in Pierson College and related matters.

YBAN commends those in the Yale community including those individuals among its membership who took the initiative to craft a compelling response from an alumni perspective regarding these disturbing acts.

To lend your voice to this matter and share your thoughts, YBAN encourages its current and prospective members to speak up by publicly posting your words of support, concern or suggestions below for the benefit of the growing YBAN community.

The Re-dedication of "The House"!

At rally, students call for tolerance

Published Thursday, November 15, 2007

Zachary Abrahamson

Staff Reporter

Yale Daily News

The a cappella group Shades summed up the mood best at Wednesday’s “Rally Against Hate” when it sang “We Shall Overcome.”

An hour before the rally — which came on the heels of recent controversy on campus about several students’ blackface Halloween costumes and slurs found spray-painted on University buildings — only a few dozen students stood by the wall outside Pierson College that just last week was defaced with the words “nigger school.”

But as the crowd marched towards Woolsey Hall bearing signs and shouting anti-bigotry slogans, intrigued bystanders joined its ranks.

By the time the last shout of “No justice, no peace” reverberated around the Woolsey Hall rotunda, some 200 students of various races had encircled a lone microphone. For the next hour, a fluid crowd of passersby listened to the frustrations of students, the regrets of University administrators and the confusion of a campus wrestling with questions of acceptance and intolerance.

“The things that were said last week aren’t the reason we’re here,” Joshua Williams ’08 said, referencing the Pierson graffiti and a similar-looking inscription of “drama fags” discovered on the wall of the University Theatre last week. “They’re part of it, but they’re not the whole reason.”

Over the past five years, rally organizers and speakers said, Yale’s campus has played host to myriad episodes of intolerance and racism. Lining the marchers’ path from Pierson to Woolsey, dozens of simple white signs — featuring student reactions to past incidents of discrimination — put that history on display.

But it was the appearance of hate speech on campus walls last week that precipitated Wednesday’s rally, students and organizers said.

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