The idea for this website came out of the rich conversations generated by an open letter sent to Yale University President Peter Salovey and the Yale Corporation. This website showcases several notable alumni whose contributions to Yale and accomplishments in life make them exceptional candidates as namesakes for the new colleges. While certainly not an exhaustive list of Yale alumni of diverse backgrounds worthy of this honor, we hope that this website makes evident that diversity can and should be a top priority in naming Yale’s two newest colleges.

We invite you to peruse the website and share it widely with Yale alumni, faculty, administrators, and other community members. We also encourage you to share your thoughts, comments, and questions in the Comments section of each profile. To find out how you can help make these colleges a reality, be sure to visit the How You Can Help page.

Together, we can advance diversity at Yale in the twenty-first century.

Christopher Lapinig CC ’07 LAW ’13
Kaozouapa Elizabeth Lee TC ’11
Jeania Ree Moore SY ’12
Ivy Onyeador SY ’11

The Bolin shield highlights Jane Bolin’s commitment to justice for families and children. Scales hanging from an elm tree with visible roots illustrate how Bolin’s law education in New Haven started her incredible career in Domestic Relations Court.

Bolin was an advocate for children who had no voice. Her legal successes include barring publicly funded childcare facilities from declining responsibility for foster children based on race or religion, and ending the practice of assigning probation officers to offenders based on ethnicity. One of her decisions, which threw out a confession obtained from a 13-year-old after seven hours of unmonitored police interrogation, was later cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Every child who comes before the court needs attention and his case must be heard and judgment made in view of all the factors of personality and environment entering into the particular child’s life,” Bolin told the New York Herald Tribune in 1943. In a partnership with Eleanor Roosevelt, she established a school to rehabilitate African American boys in the juvenile detention system. 

Bolin’s legal prowess was reinforced by her work ethic. For much of her career in the New York City Domestic Relations Court, she often stayed at work until 11 p.m. to adjudicate as many as 70 cases per day, and was recognized for having the lowest adjournment rate of all the lawyers in the court. “No matter how late one sat,” she recalled in a 1990 interview, “one took time to give each case all the necessary time.”

Despite her legacy, law school was very isolating for Bolin. After graduating from Wellesley College, Bolin attended a Yale Law where some professors blatantly ignored her inside and outside the classroom, and fellow students allowed the heavy wooden doors to slam in her face. According to historian Jacqueline McLeod, author of Daughter of the Empire State: The Life of Judge Jane Bolin, “Though it had been exactly ten years since the University Corporation at Yale voted to admit women for legal education, the climate was no more welcoming of women than it had been before this decision, and doubly hostile for black women.”

Today, we remember Bolin for her work to validate the humanity of those people entrenched in the court system, even those convicted of violent crimes. Violent youths, she insisted, were a direct result of harsh upbringings and the government’s failure to provide for its citizens. Any child convicted of a crime, she argued, could be rehabilitated with proper care and attention. “The violence in our society is reflected in them,” Bolin reflected.

The Bouchet shield stems from Edward Bouchet’s extensive studies at Yale. The elm leaves highlight his personal roots in New Haven and the colorful rays represent his work in geometrical optics.

Bouchet was born in New Haven, CT to a family active in the local church. His father was a freed slave who worked as a laborer. Even though slavery was outlawed in Connecticut in 1848, education was still segregated during Bouchet’s time, so he was educated in one of New Haven’s schools for black students.

Bouchet got his break when he secured a place at Hopkins Grammar School – which is still known for sending students to Yale today. After graduating at the top of his class at Hopkins, Bouchet entered Yale. He went on to receive both undergraduate and graduate degrees from Yale, where his thesis focused on the science of optics.

Yale degrees did not insulate the newly minted Ph.D. student from the vicious racism and segregation of his time. Rather than head to a professorship at a prestigious university, he moved to Philadelphia to become a science instructor at the Institute for Colored Youth (ICY), a Quaker-backed institution devoted to teaching the city’s black population. Today, it is known as Cheyney University. 

While Bouchet’s record of success at Yale did not immediately open the gates of academia and science to African American students, his legacy continues through the Edward A. Bouchet Undergraduate Fellowship program. The fellowship’s goal is to increase the number of minority students and others with a demonstrated commitment to eradicating racial disparities in pursuing Ph.D.s and subsequent careers in academia. 

The Cloud shield highlights Henry Roe Cloud’s Native American heritage and his efforts in education reform. The iconic thunderbird comes directly from his clan on the Winnebago Reservation while the quills and open book speak to his commitment to expanding higher education opportunities to Native Americans.

Cloud was born on the Winnebago Reservation of northeastern Nebraska sometime between 1882 and 1886. He was born into the Thunderbird clan and given the Ho-Chunk name Wo-Na-Xi-Lay-Hunka, meaning “War Chief.” He was assigned his English name when American authorities put him into government-run Indian boarding schools, where pupils were not allowed to speak their native languages. As an adult, however, he eventually began to use both his Ho-Chunk and English names.

At boarding school, he converted to Christianity, becoming very devout. This put him at odds with his tribal leadership, especially when he returned to his home reservation as a missionary, campaigning against certain traditional religious practices.

Cloud attended the Santee Normal School, a church-run school that was more pluralistic and academic than the vocationally oriented government-run schools. At Santee, mentors encouraged Cloud to apply for Mount Hermon College Preparatory School in Massachusetts. Despite taking a year off to earn tuition for Mt. Hermon by working on a farm in New Jersey, Cloud quickly caught up with the other pupils and ultimately graduated as salutatorian.

At Yale, Cloud continued to be a man of many talents, playing intramural sports, writing for the literary magazine, and joining the debate team. He also had a rich social life as a member of a fraternity, the Cosmopolitan Club, and Elihu. He was chosen as one of the three most interesting men on campus by a New Haven newspaper, along with Robert Taft, Jr., the son of President William Howard Taft. In his first year at Yale, he also met his mentors and unofficial adoptive parents, Mary and Walter Roe, missionaries dedicated to the “Indian problem.” The Roes helped Cloud give shape to his goal of founding a college preparatory school for Indians. They arranged the first of what became a lifetime of speaking engagements, where his award-winning oration aided his advocacy and fundraising efforts.

While still at Yale, Cloud worked with the Roes and others to advocate for the release of the Chiracahua Apaches, the descendants of Geronimo’s band, from their imprisonment at Fort Sill. His action was inspired in part, he said, by moral arguments he was exposed to at Yale. He also helped found the Society of American Indians, a reform organization.

Over his long career, his unique position as a full-blooded Indian, but also a trained anthropologist and missionary, made him a valued interlocutor. He worked on some of the most important research and policy initiatives of the time, including the Meriam Report, which documented the many failings of government policy regarding Native Americans. He was appointed as the highest-ranking Native American employee of the Indian Service Bureau, to the adulation of the press, and he was instrumental in convincing the tribes to agree to the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act. By the 1930s, he had visited every single reservation and commission in the country.

It was in his pedagogy that Cloud was truly a revolutionary. At the time, government-run Indian education was designed to force assimilation, while focusing on “vocational training”—a euphemism for manual labor—which sharply limited the scope of opportunities for graduates. Through his own experiences, including his time at Yale, Cloud became convinced the that key to improving the lives of Native Americans was promoting self-sufficiency, Christianity, and college preparatory education to Native leaders and advocates. When he founded the American Indian Institute in partnership with his wife, he promoted preferential hiring for Indian candidates and encouraged the inclusion of Native American language instruction, as well as the preservation and celebration of cultural traditions. He later implemented these policies when appointed head of the largest government-run Indian school in the country. This radical approach opened doors that allowed more Native American youth to follow in Cloud’s footsteps into higher education.

— Will of Mary A. Goodman 

The Goodman shield symbolizes Mary Goodman’s legacy at Yale. Ripples extending from the cross from the Divinity School shield represent how Goodman’s generous gift has created a lasting effect for theological students many generations later.

Mary A. Goodman was Yale’s very first donor of color despite her modest life as a domestic worker in New Haven, CT. At the age of 68, she died on January 26, 1872 and bequeathed Yale her entire estate of almost $5,000 (more than $94,000 in 2014 dollars). A Black American woman cognizant of the changing times, Goodman saw the need for strong leadership in her community during Reconstruction; she wanted to create a scholarship for black men to attend the Theological Department (now Yale’s Divinity School). In recognition of Goodman’s generosity and sacrifice (she may not have left funds to bury herself with such a large and selfless bequest), the Yale Corporation voted to bury her in the Yale Lot of the Grove Street Cemetery. 

East Divinity Hall, one of the former homes of the Yale Divinity School.

While women were still barred from education at the time of Goodman’s death, Yale officially changed its enrollment restriction against black men in 1870 with the acceptance of Edward Bouchet. In fall 1872, Solomon M. Coles, who was formerly enslaved, became the first officially enrolled Black American at Yale Divinity School (YDS). (Black pastor James W. C. Pennington audited classes at YDS in decades prior, but was not awarded a degree.) While Coles graduated in 1875, James William Morris became the first black graduate of YDS in 1874. Morris only needed a year of study after transferring credits from Lincoln University, where Coles also attended. Coles went on to lead a congregation in New York while Morris went to preach in South Carolina. 

The legacy of the Mary A. Goodman Scholarship remains strong today after starting a tidal wave of black student enrollment at YDS. From 1873 on, YDS had black students in almost every class. In May 2015, YDS will graduate its largest black class ever, with almost 30 students of color. 

YDS alumnus James R. Hackney, Jr., MAR ’79 remarked, “For Yale to name one of the new residential colleges after the University’s first black donor — someone who never received an education and could not, as a woman, enroll — would be incredible, and very fitting. Neighboring Grove Street Cemetery, these colleges will overlook Mary Goodman’s grave.

The Hopper shield highlights both Grace Hopper’s illustrious career in the Navy as well as her amazing contribution to computer science. The bars at the top symbolize her invention of the first compiler to translate language into computer code; the anchor and star signify her rank as Rear Admiral; and the laurels represent her lifelong commitment to academia.

Since Yale College was not co-educational when Hopper was ready for college at 17, she attended Vassar College. Despite failing the entrance exam in Latin (which delayed her matriculation for a year), Hopper graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a double major in math and physics. After finishing her bachelor’s degree, Hopper received a fellowship to Yale University where she completed her M.A. in mathematics in 1930. While teaching at Vassar, she finished her dissertation in 1934.

At Vassar, Hopper was a popular professor who was both engaging and knowledgeable. She audited a variety of classes that allowed her to connect mathematics to various aspects of her students’ lives. During her sabbatical in the fall of 1941, Hopper studied partial differential equations under Richard Courant at NYU, which later became important in her work with the Navy.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor strongly inspired Hopper to enlist and serve her country. Initially rejected because of her small stature, Hopper convinced the Navy of her value as a mathematician and received an exemption. In 1943, Hopper obtained a leave of absence from Vassar to enlist in the Navy Reserve WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) Program. She graduated first in her class from the Naval Reserve Midshipman’s School at Smith College in 1944 and was assigned second in command at Harvard University’s Computation Lab under Howard Aiken.

Despite Aiken’s initial disappointment at having a woman as his second in command, Hopper gained his trust and excelled because of her work ethic and natural leadership skills. Hopper and her team programmed the Mark I computer to solve ballistics equations for the war effort. Drawing on her training at NYU, Hopper and her team wrote code that proved uranium and plutonium could be used together to make a successful atomic bomb, the key finding that enabled the weapon to be used in WWII.

While she made an important contribution to the Manhattan project, Hopper’s greatest achievements are arguably in her contributions to the nascent field of computer science. She’s credited with inventing the subroutine and building the first compiler, both innovations that made computer science more accessible to programmers without a Ph.D. in mathematics or computer science.

The Pickens shield illustrates William Pickens’ work as an essayist, made possible by his mother’s work as a washerwoman. Two pen nibs balancing each other reference his efforts towards racial equality, while also representing his work as a writer.

Pickens was born on January 15, 1881 in South Carolina to two former slaves, Jacob and Fannie Pickens.  Pickens’ father worked as a tenant farmer, and his mother worked as a cook and washerwoman. Pickens’ family struggled with dire poverty amid severe inequality.  Pickens was the sixth of ten children, and his parents, and despite their poverty, sought first and foremost to create a life of opportunity for their children. Pickens wrote in his autobiography The Heir of Slaves, “The motives that carried my mother and father … were more than good; they were sacred. It was a consideration for the future of their children.” Searching for the opportunity to procure real education for their children, and often escaping circumstances akin to slavery, Pickens wrote that his family moved no fewer than twenty times before he turned eighteen.

In 1891, the family moved once again, this time to Argenta, Arkansas. There, Pickens studied in a school for African Americans, receiving his first taste of real education; he wrote, “I was deeply in love with school and study.” Yet one thing remained constant throughout his school days, through even his years at Yale: Pickens always worked, sometimes long hours at physically demanding jobs, in the hours before and after school and in the summer to pay for his board, fees, and books.

Four years after he began school, Pickens’ mother died “of overwork and consequent broken health [at the age of about 45]. She had been determined to keep her children in school and had worked from early morning till late at night to that end.”

After finishing grammar school, he gained entrance into a high school that charged fees for non-residents, and he continued to work to pay for school. In 1899, he graduated valedictorian of his class.

He went on to earn his first B.A. from Talladega College in 1902, and received a second B.A. from Yale University in 1904 with a degree in Classics.

Pickens wrote that his years at Yale were “two of the most interesting and successful years of all my educational career.” When he attended Yale, black students represented less than one percent of the student population. He was the second Black American student at Yale to be elected to the honor society, Phi Beta Kappa, and the first black student to win the prestigious Henry James Ten Eyck prize for oratory. While greatly encouraged by his successes, he wrote that, “It would seem that the whole world was a little too much surprised.”

In 1908, he received an M.A. from Fisk University and spent the next ten years working in higher education. From 1920 to 1942, he served as the field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He advocated for civil rights in more than one hundred newspapers across the country, and was a contributing editor for the Associated Negro Press for twenty-one years. He began work for the U.S. Department of the Treasury in 1942 and retired in 1950. Pickens passed away in 1954 and was survived by his wife, Minnie Cooper McAlpine (“the most helpful and the most enduring good fortune of all my life”) and three children (“three of the brightest and best joys that high heaven lends to earth, William, Jr., Hattie Ida and Ruby Annie”).

He concluded his autobiography with the sentence, “I have been impressed, not that every single thought and deed in the world is good, but that the resultant line of humanity’s movement is in the direction of righteousness, and that human life and the world are on the whole good things.”

The Wasserman shield highlights Elga Wasserman’s efforts to bring coeducation to Yale. The blue and green represent Yale College and Yale Law School; the balance of colors and laurel wreaths symbolize her commitment to gender equality in academia; and the pattern of hexagons across the top represents her personal study of organic chemistry.

Wasserman was born to Deszoe and Louisa Steinherz in Berlin in 1924. While her immediate family fled Germany in 1936, Wasserman lost several members of her extended family to the Nazis. The Steinherz family moved to Great Neck, NY, where Deszoe founded a legal practice and Louisa worked as a real estate broker.

Wasserman graduated at the top of her class in 1941 at the age of sixteen. She attended Smith College and organized civil rights protests on campus as a student. Wasserman’s deep-seated passion for issues concerning marginalized groups would define the rest of her life.

In 1945, Wasserman accepted a graduate fellowship to study organic chemistry at Harvard University. She was one of only two women in the department. After she married Harry Wasserman in 1947, her adviser promptly lost interest in her career plans. In 1948, the couple moved to New Haven, Connecticut in 1948, for Harry’s faculty position at Yale. Wasserman continued her studies and received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1949.

From 1950 to 1962, Wasserman held part-time teaching positions at several universities while raising her three children. At that time, female professors in science academia were scarce, and those who were married with children were even rarer. Inspired by her struggles, Wasserman wrote The Door in the Dream: Conversations with Eminent Women in Science (2000), focusing on gender parity and balancing work and family in a tenure-driven environment.

In 1962, Wasserman was appointed Assistant Dean of the Yale Graduate School, responsible for overseeing the physical and biological sciences. Six years later, when she spoke to the Dean about her professional advancement, he refused to assist or support her.

Nonetheless, Wasserman was soon appointed as Chairman of the Committee on Coeducation and was chosen by Yale President Kingman Brewster to fill the newly minted position of Special Assistant to the President on the Education of Women. Wasserman spent the next four years preparing for and guiding Yale College’s transition to a co-educational student body. This involved considering housing logistics and establishing admissions criteria.

In 1969, Yale College’s first co-educational year, the student body was comprised of over 4,000 men and 588 women. Wasserman quickly recognized the educational and social barriers women faced in this environment and wrote, “Women students need an unusual sense of self to persevere in a predominantly male setting.” Henry Chauncey, Jr., who oversaw the administrative aspects of this transition, remarked that, “Both in terms of the academic realm and the extracurricular world, she wanted the new women to have the best. She was sensible and knew when an idea was too expensive, but she could make the very best out of what was available. No single person did more to assure that co-education went well than Elga, and today’s Yale women owe her a great debt of gratitude.”

Wasserman left her position in 1972, only to return to Yale as a law student, graduating in 1976. She then clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Afterward, Wasserman opened a private family law practice, where she worked until retiring from the law in 1995.

While American women are still struggling for equal pay and good family leave policies, Wasserman’s contributions have helped move us towards a more equal future. As she said, “Because women are now teaching at Yale, men can see that women can hold positions of power even at the most elite institutions. If they were taught only by men, they did not think of women as equals. Yale still needs more senior women in the sciences.”

The Yung shield derives from the Chinese character for “mutual,” to highlight Yung Wing’s efforts to facilitate mutual exchange between the United States and China. His travels between the two nations created many metaphorical bridges while requiring him to travel across literal harbors, as signified by the enclosure of white space by sections of dense pattern.

Yung was brought to study in the United States by a Yale-educated missionary who had been his teacher in Hong Kong. Initially, he was to return to China after completing preparatory school in Connecticut, but Yung decided to stay and continue his studies.

He scrounged up some money from sponsors to take the Yale entrance exam. “How I got in, I do not know, as I had had only fifteen months of Latin and twelve months of Greek, and ten months of mathematics,” he wrote in his memoir My Life in China and America.

During his four years at Yale, Yung sang in choirs, played football, and joined the Boat Club. After winning two awards for English composition and despite nearly failing calculus, he graduated from Yale in 1854.

Not enough for the pioneering student and fervent supporter of education, Yung returned home “determined that the rising generation of China should enjoy the same educational advantages that I had enjoyed.” As he lacked the connections and experience to make that vision a reality, Yung spent the next decade dabbling in business and law in Hong Kong and southern China until he had built the political connections needed to realize that ambition.

Eighteen years after graduating from Yale, he secured approval for his plan: the Chinese Educational Mission, which would send 120 young Chinese men to the U.S. to study and develop skills they could use to build up China upon their return. Yung’s students arrived in New England in the early 1870s and lived with host families while they studied English and prepared for entrance into U.S. universities. Yale was their destination of choice, and 22 of the visiting students were admitted to the institution.

The mission, and Yung’s own life, did not end well. Chinese officials were suspicious of how Americanized many of the young students were becoming. After some of the students were barred from enrolling at West Point because of anti-Chinese sentiment, the officials called the educational mission off.

Yung himself got caught up in the maelstrom of political change at home and rising racism in the U.S. He found himself on the losing side of a change of government and tried to flee for the U.S. Sadly, his American citizenship had been revoked due to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. He managed to return to Hartford, CT without papers, and died there in poverty.

Despite the ultimate closure of the educational mission, Yung achieved his goal of expanding access to Western education for students in China.

Among the students who were able to attendYale because of Yung’s efforts were Tang Guoan, a co-founder of Tsinghua School, which later became China’s prestigious Tsinghua University; Zhan Tianyou, the engineer known as the “Father of China’s Railroads”; and Hong Yen Chang, the first Chinese immigrant licensed to practice law in the United States.

Yung was a catalyst for change. While China was benefiting from the contributions of Yale alumni from Yung’s program, Yale was rapidly becoming known for its strong Chinese studies program. Yale’s East Asia Library grew from Yung’s personal collection of Chinese books after his death. Most importantly, Yale and the United States began a long and fruitful series of educational exchanges with China. Today, Yung’s legacy lives on through the Chinese Cultural Yung Wing Scholarship, funded by the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China; the scholarship supports one year of language study for a Yale student.