The Cost of Hiding our History Will Always be Greater Than Telling it Honestly
By DeSean Dyson, Telos Director of ReStory US
In 2024, the Beinecke Library at Yale produced a documentary about a failed attempt to open an institution of higher education for Black residents in the community of New Haven, Connecticut in 1831. The documentary What Could Have Been (watch it here) does what honest history does: it replaces the quiet space of omission with a layered perspective of complexity and perpetual impact. The documentary is a testament to the power of a more thorough and objective consideration of stories that, on the surface, don’t seem to offer many layers—until we begin to dig deeper. At a time when such honest and challenging explorations of our history are being viewed as attacks on the nation or obstacles to unity, these stories must be held with commitment and conviction.
As it is now, our nation in that era was a complex political, religious, and moral nexus of people, ideas, and actions. Movements for the abolition of slavery forced real questions about what kind of systems and society we were building for people who had been defined and confined to a lesser status. History uncovers the voices that rose in opposition to liberation and human flourishing, but it also reminds us that America has a legacy of those who committed themselves to the work of justice and dignity. It also shows the weight of our unjust systems: how some of our largest institutions grew at the expense of marginalizing and oppressing people who would one day be counted as fuller participants in those very systems.
So, why revisit all of this?
Because moments like the 1831 proposal for a Black college in New Haven—and its violent rejection—reveal how power structures mobilized to preserve a racial order even at the expense of educational opportunity and moral clarity. One of the leading opponents, David Daggett, a Yale alumnus, co-founder of Yale Law School, and eventual Chief Justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, would go on to rule that Black students had no legal right to be educated in Connecticut. That ruling formed the basis for Connecticut’s so-called “Black Law” and later echoed on a national stage when the U.S. Supreme Court cited Daggett’s interpretation in the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford decision of 1857, which denied Black people citizenship and declared they had no rights that white people were bound to respect.
One of our first stops on the ReStory experience is a historical marker denoting the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision of 1896, which legalized racial segregation and the “separate-but-equal” axion of Jim Crow. Like Connecticut’s “Black Law” and the Dred Scott decision, starting at this marker sets the tone for our journey, reminding us that the logic and systems of racial hierarchy were codified at the highest levels of government. But again, to what end? Do we revisit these sites and unpack these stories simply to provoke shame and resentment through a more thorough telling of history? Do we hope to load the assumed baggage that comes with reflection and regret on ancestors and descendants now struggling to locate their connection and culpability in this complex matrix of story and testimony, a matrix that calls us to live for today, not just reflect on days gone by?
ReStorying is not just about remembering or being stuck in a loop of backward-looking shame. It’s about building and imagining what can be done to become the best version of ourselves while wrestling with the most realistic and accurate account of humanity we can with the tools we have at our disposal.
We walk into the spaces.
We hear the stories.
We touch and breathe in the experiences so that our minds might be better situated with our hearts and souls.
Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects that there are “limits of genius.” Sometimes there is a need to,
“walk the land as opposed to intuit and hypothesize from the edge… The accretion of imperfect, discomfiting life must be seen and felt so that the space in your mind, gray, automatic, and square, fills with angle, color, and curve… But color is not just in the physical world you observe but in the unique interaction between that world and your consciousness—in your interpretation, your subjectivity, the things you notice in yourself.”
We build a better nation not only by committing to the collective liberation and flourishing of our neighbor but by wrestling with these things in a deeply personal way.
To lose this is about more than the loss of educational institutions or marginalized perspectives; it’s about losing a commitment to want better for ourselves and others. The recent Presidential executive order that claims to “restore history” does so in a way that neglects to take an honest account of what it has meant to be part of this nation’s complex story, and that would come at a great loss to us as individuals and as a whole. Committing to push through and into the depths of our stories is how we come to truly know one another and build the more unified nation that is so often the aim of the aspirational language we misuse and misappropriate.
I close where I started, referencing The School That Never Was. One of the most powerful exhibits on display as they tell this story is an empty bookcase representing all of the knowledge that was “lost and could have been.”
Let’s not make the same mistake, failing to realize that hiding our history will cost us far more than an honest telling of it ever will. Let’s all be committed to not letting the losing and erasure continue. It’s already cost us so much.
Let’s instead build a future with the many pieces we’ve failed to acknowledge and celebrate properly in this march toward collective liberation and true unity.
One way you can do that? Join us on a ReStory US experience this next year. And listen to our recent podcast episode with Daniel Bannoura, about the ReStory US trip we took with a group of Palestinian theologians, social scientists, and leaders last month.
