His race went previously unrecorded because he had already been named Yale’s first Jewish graduate. But in 1817, after a racially motivated insult, he was tried for assault and battery and referred to as a “Black lawyer.”
While research has concluded that each one of the students could hold the pioneering title, another name has arisen as a possibility – Randall Lee Gibson, class of 1853. Ancestry research revealed that Gibson’s grandfather was a man of color, though Gibson never acknowledged it. He became a general in the Confederate Army.
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Little Known Black History Fact: Yale University’s First Black Graduate was originally published on blackamericaweb.com
