In 1831, a coalition of black leaders and white abolitionists proposed the first African-American college in New Haven, Connecticut, in an attempt to open a door to education that had been largely closed during a time of slavery.

Instead, the town’s freedmen—white male landowners with the sole authority to vote, many with ties to Yale College—rejected the plans by a vote of 700-4. Violence erupted in the following months, with attacks on black residents, their homes and the property of their white supporters.

Now, 193 years later, New Haven leaders are considering a public apology for the harm done when their predecessors destroyed the plans.

City Alder Thomas Ficklin Jr., a Democrat, introduced a proposed resolution in August with the help of city historian Michael Morand. It is seeking a formal apology and encouraging city schools and Yale to offer educational programs about the events of 1831. Officials are considering holding a second public hearing on the proposal and expect the full Arini Council to take it up later this year autumn.

Ficklin, however, failed to see the proposal go ahead. He died suddenly at his home on October 9 at the age of 75, a few weeks after an interview with The Associated Press.

“My political ancestors were involved in this,” Ficklin told the AP. “Now we have a chance to have a say not only about their actions, about the actions of our ancestors, but also about how we will be judged in the future.”

His wife, Julia Ficklin, said the resolution was one of the last things on his desk at home.

“I know it was very important to him,” she said in a phone interview. “And one of my prayers for the last couple of days, when I’m grieving, is that somebody would step up and pick up where they left off and sort it out, one way or another.”

Morand promised to continue Ficklin’s work and said aldermen will bring the resolution to a vote.

Interest in the city’s rejection of the Black college was rekindled two years ago when Morand and Tubyez Cropper, who both work at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, released a short video documentary about it.

The apology debate comes after Yale, which has been in New Haven since the early 1700s, formally apologized for its ties to slavery in February. A research project by the Ivy League school determined that many of its founders and early leaders owned slaves, as did many donors. Prominent members of the Yale community were part of the opposition to the Black college.

Two years after the 1831 rejection, state legislators passed what was called the “Negro Law,” making it illegal to run a school to educate out-of-state black people. This law was cited in the US Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, which said African Americans could not be US citizens. This decision was overturned by constitutional amendments passed after the Civil War.

The events of 1831 were a key starting moment in the abolitionist movement, Cropper said, although the term “abolition” was not widely used at the time. Plans for the black men’s college in New Haven became known throughout the country after they were approved by the first Free People of Color Convention in Philadelphia and reported by abolitionist publications, he said.

“This is really like a tipping point,” Cropper said.

By the summer of 1831, Black’s college supporters had concrete plans. A site was chosen in New Haven where the Interstate 95 and 91 interchange now stands. A financing plan called for donations of $10,000 from white supporters and $10,000 from black supporters.

In early September, Simeon Jocelyn, a white pastor of a black congregation in the city, spoke at the church about improving the lives of black people. He and William Lloyd Garrison, editor of an abolitionist newspaper in Boston, were among the white supporters of the proposed college.

However, a day after the speech, the city’s white mayor, Dennis Kimberly, a Yale graduate, published an announcement that a meeting of the city’s freemen to consider the proposed college would be held in two days. At that meeting the college was rejected.

During Jocelyn’s speech at the church, news of the violent rebellion of Nat Turner’s slaves in Virginia had reached the town. At least 55 whites were killed in the rebellion. Dozens of black people were killed as punishment, and Turner was later executed. According to Yale researchers, rebellion may have played a role in white freedmen’s opposition to the college.

At the time, slavery was still legal in Connecticut, but it was not widespread. The state would not abolish slavery until 1848, the last in New England to do so.

The freemen’s resolutions against the school said that the immediate emancipation of slaves in some states was “an undue and dangerous interference with the internal concerns of other states, and ought to be discouraged.” They also said that a black college would be “incompatible with the prosperity, if not the existence” of Yale and other schools in the area, and “destructive to the best interests of the city.”

After the vote, Southern newspapers applauded the freemen’s action, wrote Morand, the city’s historian, in a history of the events.

The decision didn’t just close educational opportunities for blacks, he noted. It sent a nationwide message “reinforcing the status quo of slavery and racial oppression.”

A key player in opposition to the New Haven college was David Daggett, a founder of Yale Law School and a former US senator. Daggett was also a Connecticut state judge who in 1833 presided over a trial that led to the conviction of Prudence Crandall, who in 1995 was officially designated by the legislature as a state heroine for leading a school for black girls in Canterbury, in violation of the state’s Black Law.

Crandall’s conviction was later overturned, but she closed her school due to safety concerns over repeated harassment of her and her students by local residents, including a fire at the school.

In 1837, Cheyney University of Pennsylvania became the first black college or university in the country. A year later, Connecticut’s Black Law was repealed.