Ebenezer Bassett

Ebenezer Bassett was born in Derby, Connecticut in 1833. In 1853, he was the first Black graduate of the Connecticut Normal School (now Central Connecticut State University). After graduation, Bassett moved to New Haven to teach at the Whiting School. In 1855, he joined the Temple Street Congregational Church and married Eliza Park, daughter of Robert Park, a New Haven leader and scientific research assistant of Yale professor Benjamin Silliman. He is believed to have attended Yale or to have studied with Yale faculty in the 1850s.

Bassett was an educator at the Institute for Colored Youth, an important anti-slavery activist, and the nation’s first Black ambassador, appointed U.S. Minister Resident to Haiti by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1869. Bassett was considered a national Black leader, and was a friend and confidant of Frederick Douglass. In 1879, he was invited to speak at the Yale Law School on the topic of “Right to Asylum.”

He died in 1908 and is buried at Grove Street Cemetery. Two of his sons also attended Yale College: Ebenezer Bassett, Jr., who attended from 1881-1882, and Ulysses Simpson Grant Bassett, who graduated in 1895.

Handbook of Haiti. n.p., 1892.

"The Voice of a Negro: Should Haiti be Annexed to the United States," The Voice of the Negro 1, no. 5 (1904).

"Speech of Ebenezer D. Bassett of Philadelphia at the Anniversary of the Deleware [Sic] Association for the Moral Improvement and Education of the Colored People, Held in Institute Hall, February 28th, 1868," Self-published, 1868.