Pulitzer prize winner David Blight follows his biography of Frederick Douglass with a deep dive into his university’s dark past

In 2019, the Yale historian David Blight won a Pulitzer prize, for his monumental biography of Frederick Douglass. In 2020, Blight was beginning work on his next book, a life of the writer and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson. Then his college president called.

“Peter Salovey called me up, in the depths of Covid, and said: ‘Would you lead, manage and write the history of Yale and slavery?”