Michael Morand, guest lecturer in David Blight's Yale course on slavery and its legacies, examines a forgotten episode in Yale's own history: an 1831 proposal, backed by Black and white abolitionists meeting in New Haven, to found the nation's first Black college. Morand traces how Yale's leadership and the city's civic establishment moved to block the plan, situating the episode within the early republic's broader anxieties about Black citizenship, education, and the expanding institution of slavery. Drawing on archival sources tied to New Haven and Yale, the lecture connects this local defeat to national debates over abolition, colonization, and the limits of civic inclusion in the decades before the Civil War. As part of the 2024 DeVane Lecture Series, it treats Yale itself as a case study in how American institutions were shaped by, and sometimes actively resisted, the demands of racial justice in the early nineteenth century.