What Could Have Been

What Could Have Been: a short documentary film about the proposal for America’s first HBCU in New Haven, Connecticut, 1831
Directed and edited by Tubyez Cropper
Written by Tubyez Cropper & Michael Morand
Produced by Beinecke Library
Narrator: Charles Warner Jr.
Other voices: John Monahan, Tubyez Cropper, Michael Morand
Special Thanks:
• Alvin Ashiatey for research and design consultation
• Claire Barnes for filming assistance
• All of the scholars, past and present, who have written about this essential story, as well as those who have spoken with any of this film’s creators about the story and its time period, including: Gilbert Hobbes Barnes, Julia W. Bernier, Howard H. Bell, David W. Blight, Joy Burns, Miguel Ceballo-Countryman, Stacey Close, Hugh Davis, Robert A. Gibson, Donasia Gray, Katherine Harris, Peter Hinks, Peter J. Malia, Mary Beth McQueeney, Wm. Frank Mitchell, Mary H. Mitchell, Hilary Moss, Ben Parten, James Brewer Stewart, and Robert Austin Warner.
• Library colleagues, near and far, in Yale University Library (including Beinecke Library, Manuscripts & Archives, and Divinity), in the Whitney Library of the New Haven Museum, at the New Haven Free Public Library, at the Boston Public Library, and more.
• The Yale & Slavery Research Project (yaleandslavery...)
• Colored Conventions Project (coloredconvent...)
• Carolyn Baker, Hope McGrath, and Michelle Zacks
For further reading:
"College for colored youth : an account of the New-Haven city meeting and resolutions ... " compiled by Simeon Jocelyn, 1831, complete work digitized: collections.li...
• Gibson, Robert A. “A Deferred Dream: The Proposal for a Negro College in New Haven, 1831,” in Journal of the New Haven Colony Historical Society, Volume 37, Number 2, 1991
• Moss, Hilary J. "'Cast Down on Every Side': The Ill-Fated Campaign to Found an 'African College' in New Haven," in African American Connecticut Explored, 2014
• Moss, Hilary J.. "Education's Inequity: Opposition to Black Higher Education in Antebellum Connecticut," in History of Education Quarterly, Spring, 2006
• Stewart, James Brewer. "The New Haven Negro College and the Meanings of Race in New England, 1776-1870," in The New England Quarterly, September, 2003
All music legally used through MotionArray subscription