Yale University on Friday issued a formal apology for its early leaders’ involvement with slavery, accompanied by the release of a detailed history of the university’s connections to slavery and a list of what it said were initial steps to make some amends.

The announcement came more than three years after Yale announced a major investigation into the university’s connections to slavery, the slave trade and abolition, amid intense national conversations about racial justice set off by the murder of George Floyd. And it frames what the school’s leaders say will be a continuing commitment to repair.

“We recognise our university’s historical role in and associations with slavery, as well as the labour, the experiences and the contributions of enslaved people to our university’s history, and we apologise for the ways that Yale’s leaders, over the course of our early history, participated in slavery,” the university’s president, Peter Salovey, and the senior board trustee, Josh Bekenstein, said in a message to the university community.

“Acknowledging and apologising for this history are only part of the path forward,” they continued.