Yale Alumni Magazine | Blogs

What's in a name? Looking for answers at Calhoun College

By Carole Bass ’83, ’97MSLJ | 5:09pm March 19 2014

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  Something's missing: Chris Rabb ’92 and the stained-glass John C. Calhoun, minus the shackled, kneeling black man.

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Among the wonders of Yale that greeted Chris Rabb: a stained-glass portrait of John C. Calhoun, class of 1804, "and a black man in shackles, in tatters, kneeling before him." The window illuminated the common room in Calhoun College—named in 1933 for the white supremacist statesman—when Rabb arrived as a member of the class of 1992.
Approaching the residential college's master, he said: "That is literally institutional racism," recalls Rabb, some of whose ancestors were enslaved in Calhoun's native South Carolina. "It’s architecturally baked into Calhoun, and it’s sickening."
Eventually the master (a title drawn from the English university system, not from the American human-chattel system) had the black man excised from the window. But Calhoun himself remains—in image and in name—despite the objections of some alumni and others who believe that Yale should revoke the honor accorded a politician who promoted slavery as "a great blessing."