Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed

Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed is the first Black person known to have graduated from the Yale School of Medicine. He was born and raised in New Haven, where his parents were pillars of the Black community. His mother, Vashti, was the city’s first Black teacher; she taught at the school established at the Temple Street Congregational Church, the first independent Black congregation in New Haven. His father, John, was an immigrant from St. Croix who worked as a business owner and a custodian at Yale, including for the Calliopean Society and Skull and Bones; he catered the commencement dinners for many years. John was also an abolitionist who sold The Liberator, the influential antislavery newspaper. A grandfather, Prince Duplex, Sr., had fought in the Revolutionary War.

Cortlandt Creed graduated from New Haven’s Lancasterian School, a preparatory school, and then from Yale’s medical school in 1857. He graduated from Yale in the same year Richard Henry Greene, another Black student from New Haven, received his bachelor’s degree from Yale College.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Creed longed to join the fight for freedom. He wrote to the governor of Connecticut: “The hour has come, and ‘Old Connecticut’ God bless Her has spoken, and on every side we behold her colored sons rallying to the sounds of ‘Liberty and the Union.’” In January 1864, Dr. Creed received his commission as a surgeon in Thirtieth Connecticut Volunteers, the second Black regiment organized in the state. He served for the duration of the war and in the Connecticut National Guard during peacetime.

During the Civil War, Creed led local efforts to celebrate and advance Black freedom and rights. In 1862, he participated in a “Jubilee Meeting” “of the colored people of New Haven…in commemoration of the Emancipation of Slavery in the District of Columbia.” He was an organizer of a Freedmen’s Aid Society in New Haven, dedicated to “extending relief to the liberated and in providing aid toward such other improvements in their condition as circumstances may demand.” After the Civil War, Dr. Creed practiced medicine in New Haven and New York. He died in 1900 and is buried in Grove Street Cemetery.

"Dissertation on the Blood." M.D. diss., Yale University, 1857.