In our January 1970 issue, we published some memories of Yale by William Ashby (fourth from right in the second row in this 1915 photo of Yale's Alpha Phi Alpha chapter), who got his Bachelor of Divinity degree from Yale in 1916. Ashby, a Black man who went on to become a social worker and civil rights activist in Newark, had good and bad memories of Yale. On one hand, when he and his Black friends went to a football game against Brown when the Bears had a Black player—a rarity at the time—he heard the Yale crowd scream racist taunts at the player. (Ashby and his friends moved to the Brown side and cheered him on.) On the other hand, he remembered the "shocking, astounding" feeling of going to dinner with other new students at the home of Div School dean Charles Brown: "I sat at their dining table. I ate their food. They served me. I used their china, silver, napkins, glassware. Always before, I had been the servant of white people. This was a drastic revolution in life as I knew it.”
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