Pioneers in Yale’s Scholarship and Sports:

Mary A. Goodman and Alice Sumner Camp

East Divinity Hall from the northwest corner of the New Haven Green, 1870. It was demolished in 1931 to make way for the construction of what is now Grace Hopper College.

The Divinity School building, designed by the architect Richard Morris Hunt, was constructed in 1869–1870. In 1871, Mrs. Mary A. Goodman, a formerly enslaved African American woman living in New Haven, established a scholarship for Yale divinity students. She left her entire property, valued at $5,000, to endow a Yale Divinity School scholarship for young men of color preparing for the ministry, with the provision that if there were none, the annual income of her bequest be awarded to other students.

An extract from Mary A. Goodman's will detailing her benefaction, January 7, 1916.

Mary A. Goodman's memorial stone in the Grove Street Cemetery.

After her death in 1872, the New Haven Daily Palladium gave a full report, commending Yale because “as [Mrs. Goodman] had provided no place of burial for herself, she was fitly interred in the lot in the old cemetery belonging to the university of which she has become a benefactor.” Yale provided a tombstone with the following inscription: “Mary A. Goodman, of African descent, she gave the earnings of her life to educate men of her own color in Yale College for the Gospel ministry.”   

Portrait of Alice Sumner Camp, circa 1890

Alice Sumner Camp (1861-1934), wife of Walter Camp, “Father of American Football” and the first Yale coach, was known as the second. College sports were unpaid volunteer activities in the nineteenth century, and Walter served as head of the New Haven Clock Company. Alice not only attended practices and took notes when he could not attend, she actively coached. A football history states that “one of the best football minds in America belonged to Alice Sumner Camp.”

Yale University Foot Ball Association season ticket, 1896

Program cover from the November 16, 1907 Princeton-Yale football game

Postcard from the Yale football College Girls series, 1907