General Public

Join us for an opening reception at Miller Hall for the ISM’s new art exhibit, Take Me As I Am: Redemption and Grace for the Discarded, featuring appearances by exhibit artists Lance Flowers, Robert Hodge, and Jason Woods (aka Flash Gordon Parks). Reception begins at 5 p.m and panel discussion begins at 5:30 p.m. Sponsored by the Institute of Sacred Music’s Religion, Ecology, and Expressive Culture Initiative.

Free and open to the public.

Exhibit curated by Robert Hodge.

Center Church on the Green and Beinecke Library welcome all to a special screening of the documentary film “What Could Have Been” about the proposal for America’s first HBCU in New Haven in 1831

The screening will be followed by a conversation and q&a session with film director Tubyez Cropper and narrator Charles Warner, Jr. They are both lifelong New Haveners and graduates of New Haven Public Schools. Cropper is a Community Engagement Program Manager at Beinecke and Warner is Chair of the Connecticut Freedom Trail.

George Williamson Crawford was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1877. He attended Tuskegee Institute and Talladega College and graduated from Yale Law School in 1903. He was appointed clerk of New Haven Probate Court in 1903. Crawford worked in private practice in New Haven from 1907 to 1954, when he was appointed corporation counsel for the City of New Haven, an office he held until 1962. Crawford died in 1972.

Business owner, abolitionist, service worker, father, community leader: John William Creed embodies the many strands of New Haven Black history in the 19th century.

His photograph, taken in 1863, was recently found in the Beinecke, included in the back of a photo album of the secret society, Skull and Bones, where Creed worked. The pencil inscription reads “Old Creed, janitor.” Since finding the image of Creed, several other photographs of Black custodians have been located in the Yale collections.

Save the date and join us to support the 2024 Walk to End Alzheimer’s by:

•Purchasing raffle tickets for your chance to win cool prizes ($20)
•Donating $10 to receive a professional headshot on the spot from Maza Rey
•Purchasing Ms. K’s Kupcake Boutique infamous cupcakes (2 for $5)
•Wearing purple
•Joining the Yale University Affinity Groups Team

In this talk, scholar and librarian Lily Todorinova will draw on her recent essay in Higher Education Quarterly that recontextualizes the Yale Report of 1828, a declarative statement about the purpose of higher education, issued at a crucial time in the development of American colleges. Todorinova argues that the report’s advocacy for classical liberal education should be understood alongside the racial concerns of its authors, some of whom were well-known colonizationists who viewed African American education as a threat to New Haven’s social and economic stability.

Collective Consciousness Theatre and Kulturally LIT have partnered to present a reading of James Baldwin’s play Blues for Mister Charlie at the Beinecke Library this Summer.

Join Descendants of the CT 29th Colored Regiment for their 9th Annual Juneteenth Festival on Saturday, June 22nd. The social wellness of all people of color is the inspiration of this year’s theme – Pan Africanism: Unified by History, Connected in Culture, and Focused on the Future.

To mark Independence Day 2024, the Beinecke Library continues its tradition of public readings on July 5 at 4pm on the library mezzanine of the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, and of the oration by Frederick Douglass given on July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, in which he asked: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”

A Contemporary Wind Octet Expedition through the expressions of James Baldwin