Just last Friday, we told you
that the first African American to graduate from Yale College was not
Edward Bouchet in 1874, but Richard Henry Green in 1857. Since then,
though, we've been reminded of two other nineteenth-century alumni whose
histories complicate—or problematize, as they like to say in the academy—our attempt to name the first African American graduate.
The most fascinating case surrounds Moses Simons, Class of 1809, who is, oddly enough, considered to be Yale's first Jewish graduate. (Dan Oren ’79, ’84MD, makes that case for Simons in his book Joining the Club: A History of Jews at Yale.)
But two scholars, relying almost exclusively on an account of an 1818
criminal assault trial in New York, have advanced the claim that Simons
was African American—most likely, they say, the son of a Jewish man,
also named Moses Simons, and of an African American mother.
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