Читать книгу Upending the Ivory Tower - Stefan M. Bradley - Страница 11

2

Unsettling Ol’ Nassau

Princeton University from Jim Crow Admissions to Anti-Apartheid Protests

We knew we were intruders in the white country club.

—Shearwood McClelland, 1998

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the brother of famed black Renaissance man and the town of Princeton’s own Paul Robeson attempted to make an application at Princeton University. The university president at the time, Woodrow Wilson, refused his application even after the town of Princeton’s most popular black minister, William Drew Robeson (Paul Robeson’s father) of Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church, appealed to Wilson personally. Historically, black ministers acted as liaisons between black and white communities, which had typically been the case in the town of Princeton. With regard to the Reverend Robeson’s son’s application for admission, however, the tacit relationship between the black clergy and white institutional power meant nothing. Paul Robeson resented Princeton University’s treatment of his brother and father for the rest of his life.

Princeton, as a northern town and an elite university, was as segregated as any place below the Mason-Dixon Line for much of its history. Although black students met with cold receptions when they arrived at the seven other American Ivy League universities, they could at least attend those schools. Unlike those fortunate students who attended the seven other Ivies, African American students could not attend Princeton in earnest until the middle of the twentieth century. For that reason, Princeton University earned the unique reputation of being what one might describe as southern-most Ivy as it took on the culture of the Old South.1 One can understand how engulfing racism was in this nation’s history by studying the experience of black people at Princeton University—a premiere institution of education.

Those associated with Princeton University and other elite Ivy League schools can proudly say that their students, faculty, and administrators go on to literally lead the nation in terms of politics, culture, and economics. For instance, presidents of Princeton University signed the Declaration of Independence and created the Fourteen Points Plan and one need not look any further than recent American presidents and U.S. Supreme Court justices for the contemporary influence of the Ivy League.2 With that in mind, Princeton affiliates boast that their university is “in the nation’s service and in the service of all nations.”3 In essence, Ivy League universities represent at times the best and most powerful aspects of America. The standards that these universities use to select students and the curricula that the Ivy institutions establish trickle down in various forms to institutions of higher education throughout the nation and the world.4 Although Princeton University and its peers are among the oldest and most prestigious American universities, in some ways these institutions had to be led into a new era of freedom for black people and social justice. In the twentieth century, students and progressive-minded school officials, as well as social movements led to Princeton’s acceptance of black students, the establishment of its Black Studies curriculum, and the school’s stand against apartheid South Africa.

Although there is rich scholarly literature surrounding Princeton University in general, surprisingly little has been written about Princeton and its historic relationship with black people. Carl A. Fields, who came to Princeton as an administrator in 1964, published his memoirs of his tenure at Princeton. Recently, Melvin McCray, a black alumnus, produced a documentary titled Looking Back: Reflections of Black Princeton Alumni that covers the topic. Jerome Karabel, in The Chosen (2005), discussed Princeton’s struggle to attract a certain type of student that did not include African Americans and even Jews at one point.5 Marcia Synnott and Geoffrey Kabaservice wrote about admissions and the leadership at Princeton. Then, James Axtell constructed a history of the New Jersey Ivy institution. Comprehensive in many aspects, Axtell’s history neglects the role of black people in shaping Princeton. Several articles in university publications have focused on the arrival of black students to campus, but the evolution from black admissions to the campus activism of black students remains generally absent.

When scholars of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement discuss the protests and demonstrations that took place in the state of New Jersey, they typically mention the unrest that occurred in Newark during the urban uprisings of 1967.6 Some remember the student protests that occurred at Rutgers University during the period.7 But less attention has been paid to the student demonstrations that took place on the beautifully landscaped campus of Princeton University in the late 1960s. Although there were no snipers atop buildings and no tanks maneuvering through campus, as was the case during the Newark uprising, students on Princeton’s campus took up the cause of the black freedom movement in their own way. This chapter seeks to illuminate the role that students, particularly African American students, played in transforming Princeton University using agitation that was inspired in part by the activism off campus. Black students and administrators as well as white university officials were keenly aware of what occurred in the nearby townships. By the end of the 1960s, black students, with the assistance of liberal university officials, were able to improve Princeton University’s relationship with black people domestically and abroad with their campus campaigns. The progress that black students made at Princeton was squarely in the context of the urban uprisings in the Northeast as well as the organizing efforts of the Black Power Movement that was underway.

Of its Ivy League counterparts, Princeton, in terms of culture, was certainly closest to the American Old South that fostered strict racial separation and blatant stereotypes. Several of the university’s early trustees owned slaves, and during the antebellum period nearly half of the student body consisted of southerners, which was more than other Ivy League institutions at the time. One of the university’s presidents, John MacLean, held membership with the American Colonization Society, which encouraged the deportation of black people for the sake of the nation. In that sense, the school had a long, entangled history with black people and Jim Crow policies.8

As did many of the Ivy League institutions, Princeton originated with unofficial ties to religious groups. The Presbyterian Church helped to establish the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton University.9 Adhering to the mission of Christianity, the college trained men (Princeton University did not become coeducational until 1969) to enter the Presbyterian ministry. By 1774, two African students attended Princeton Theological Seminary (which was technically separate from the university) for “preparatory work” preceding a trip to Africa for missionary work.10 Although enrolled for several years, the aforementioned students, Bristol Yamma and John Quamine, left without graduating. The September 25, 1792, minutes of Princeton’s Board of Trustees reveals a recommendation that a free black man, John Chavis, study with the president of the university, John Witherspoon.11 After studying with Witherspoon, Chavis later became a Presbyterian minister in North Carolina. Incidentally, two centuries later John Chavis’s descendant Benjamin Chavis became the executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and eventually a minister with the Nation of Islam.12

Princeton as a town allowed slavery, and enslaved people were present on Princeton University’s campus. One Princeton student turned in a black man he recognized in the town of Princeton for violating the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793.13 A relative of former university president John Witherspoon eventually paid to manumit the escaped slave, but the culture of the university permitted those who favored the peculiar institution. As one observer noted about its relationship to black people, “she [Princeton] has not measured up to the Christian standard in her attitude.” The observer claimed that this owed largely “to the proslavery spirit … caused by Southern slave holders, who settled in and about the place.”14

In the years after slavery ended, Princeton continued to confront challenges regarding the presence of black people on campus. During Reconstruction black men came to campus not as enslaved servants but as potential students. By 1876, four black men were attending Princeton’s Theological Seminary. As was custom, the university permitted seminary students to attend courses. When one of the black students, Daniel Culp, entered a psychology course on Princeton’s campus, some of the white students rebelled. A southern newspaper reported the presence of this black student upset “some representatives from the ‘Sunny South’ ” so much that the southerners chose to exit the lectures.15 Subsequently, several of those southern white students left the university in protest of the black student’s presence. The rebelling students later requested to be readmitted when the university president refused to expel the black student.16 Twenty years later, Alexander Dumas Watkins, a black man, was an informal instructor for several years in the department of histology at Princeton where he assisted geology professor William Libbey.

At the turn of the century, Princeton president Woodrow Wilson (in a foreshadowing act to his time in the White House) ensured that the institution would remain exclusively white. Reared as a southerner in a family that once enslaved Africans, Wilson frequently embraced racial stereotypes associated with black people and disregarded them as innately inferior beings. A fellow Princeton alumnus remembered Wilson’s great ability to tell “darky” jokes.17 Like many southerners of the period, Wilson strongly opposed the mixing of races on the grounds that it would taint the pure white race. In 1904, Wilson discussed the potential presence of black students at Princeton: “While there is nothing in the law of the University to prevent a negro’s entering, the whole temper and tradition of the place are such that no negro has ever applied for admission, and it seems extremely unlikely that the question will ever assume a practical form.”18 Wilson’s words were not encouraging.

Five years later, a black student from the Virginia Theological Seminary and College wrote to Wilson, stating “I want so much to come to your school at Princeton.”19 Wilson quickly referred the letter to his secretary, who replied on the president’s behalf that the aspiring student should either attend a university in the South or apply to universities like Harvard, Dartmouth, or Brown, where he would be more welcome.20 It came as no surprise to many when Wilson, who in 1912 was elected president of the United States, resegregated all government offices or when he endorsed the glorification of the Ku Klux Klan in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. Furthermore, Wilson, who had received a doctorate in government and history from Johns Hopkins University, claimed that the movie, which demeaned black citizens, was like history written in lightning. The irony of the matter was that Wilson, while president of Princeton and the nation, pushed to advance democracy. He waged a campaign to change Princeton’s class caste system by attempting to abolish the exclusive eating clubs. The clubs provided many of the social activities on campus, but they also denied students of lower economic ranks. Wilson believed it was wrong to turn away students because of their economic class, but did not go a step further by removing de facto Jim Crow barriers to the admission of black students.

Wilson had support from his fellow alumni. As one alumnus put it, “Princeton must remain the shining citadel of white supremacy and set an example for all of the world to see of the tolerance and intelligence of the white man.”21 Indeed, to state that there were no African Americans on Princeton’s campus during the first part of the twentieth century would be fallacious. There were black cooks who prepared food for the exclusive eating clubs (which was characteristic of eating facilities at nearly all the Ivy institutions) and, in at least one case, a black man acted as a servant for one of Princeton’s premiere constitutional scholars.22 Until the 1940s, those were some of the only black people Princetonians saw at the university. In some ways the auspicious presence of black people almost exclusively in the role of cooks and servants was reminiscent of images from the institutions of the Old South. A Dartmouth College president in the 1920s claimed that at Brown, Penn, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Harvard, few black students were admitted but those who did attend could participate in the bulk of college life. At Yale, he explained, black students were admitted but did not have the opportunity to socialize with their white classmates. The Dartmouth president observed that with regard to Princeton University and black students, however, “the color line is drawn with the utmost rigidity and the [black] man [is] not even given access to the curriculum.”23

In 1939, Princeton town resident Bruce M. Wright applied and won a scholarship to attend the university. Although he was talented as a high school student, he happened to be black. Wright had not seen any reason to share his race with the admissions office and no officials thought to ask. The underpinnings of the sacred white institution nearly came loose when the stand-out student arrived to register for courses. The white registration officials, using their innate powers of racial perception, immediately recognized Wright as black. They mobilized to protect the sanctity of Princeton by refusing to enroll the scholarship-winning teenager in any courses and by expeditiously shooing him off the yard.24

Crestfallen, Wright knew why he could not attend, but he wanted the Princeton officials to explain their broken logic. In response to a letter Wright wrote, the dean of admissions reasoned that as someone who had “very pleasant relations with” the “colored race,” about which he was “particularly interested,” he believed that Princeton would be too lonely a place for a black student and that such a student would not be “happy in this environment.” He further explained that there were a great number of southern white students there who held close to their “tradition.” Overall, he concluded, it would be best for a black student to not challenge the culture.25 His letter did not read any differently from those of the noble white men who had previously denied black applicants. If anything, it provided a superb example of white paternalism and racism wrapped into one document. Further it made clear the position of those who had the power to make decisions on behalf of the institution.

World War II forced officials at American institutions to reflect on their policies of excluding citizens. The U.S. military is as steeped in tradition as any American institution; yet, the military in some ways outpaced the rest of American society as it concerned racial progress. In the case of Princeton, the actions of the military helped to change the admission practices of the Ivy League institution. The U.S. Navy, in partnership with Princeton University, instituted the V-12 Navy College Training Program on campus. The program allowed naval cadets to take college courses in the hope of increasing the number of eligible officers for service during war time.26 In 1945, the partnership resulted in admission of four black naval cadets. The efforts of northern civilian activists of the NAACP, who waged the “Double V(ictory)” campaign during World War II, also had some influence on Princeton’s policies of allowing black students as undergraduates. Those activists sought to defeat fascism abroad and to dismantle racism at home.27 With black serviceman attending Princeton, they achieved both goals.

In the midst of World War II, some Princeton alumni could not justify making the world safe for democracy and rescuing Jewish victims from Nazi concentration camps while their university rejected American citizens who wanted to attend an American university. Norman Thomas, member of the class of 1905, explained that Princeton men claim that their alma mater “is for the nation’s service” and is “dedicated to ‘democracy,’ … to ‘the liberal spirit’—in complete opposition to fascist standards. Yet Princeton maintains a racial intolerance almost worthy of Hitler.”28 Thomas decried the fact that “a race which is furnishing an increasing number of artists, musicians, scientists, can send no man be he as versatile as Paul Robeson … to the fourth oldest American institution of learning.” Thomas chided that “Negroes may go to, and make good in Harvard, Yale, Columbia … indeed all leading American colleges and universities except Princeton.”29 Between 1928 and 1948, Thomas ran as a Socialist candidate for president of the United States. He also received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Princeton.30 Another alumnus echoed Thomas’s sentiment. Ralph J. Reiman, from the class of 1935, stated that “Negro students have much to offer Princeton and Princeton has much to offer Negro students.”31 Reiman eventually graduated Harvard Law and served as a U.S. Army intelligence officer during World War II.32

Two students from the class of 1945, W. F. Weaver and J. L. Webb, exclaimed that “to make democracy come true we must begin at home.”33 For Weaver and Webb, manifesting democracy at home meant allowing black students to matriculate at the university. Another student hoped for racial progress at the institution: “Princeton, a leading university with a strong Southern tradition, could seize this opportunity to take the lead in working out the only alternative to eventual revolution—that alternative is [racial] cooperation.… Lest we forget, Princeton is the last of the leading institutions outside the deep South which still adheres to this faith in racial superiority.”34 Although few in number, there was a contingent of concerned Princeton affiliates pressuring the university to evolve.

In some areas of post–World War II American society, the race problem tempered. Jackie Robinson signed a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which desegregated the U.S. military, and the Supreme Court ruled against the segregation of public interstate transportation and restrictive covenants. Robinson’s entry into the major leagues, the desegregation of the armed forces, and the rulings of the Supreme Court occurred because of the constant efforts of black citizens who wanted to ensure their nation lived out its creed.35

As U.S. officials and heroic American citizens made history, so too did one of the four naval cadets whom Princeton admitted in 1945. While on campus, these black student-sailors did not join the exclusive eating clubs and rarely socialized outside of class with their fellow white students. Despite the social isolation, in 1947 John L. Howard became the first African American to receive a bachelor’s degree from the university.36 Howard, who had attended integrated schools in New York, noted that his was a “very mellow experience.” He explained that he was not attending “traditional” Princeton University but rather a “wartime Princeton” that catered to students from the military.37 Howard eventually became an orthopedic surgeon. By 1948, another black cadet, James E. Ward, also received a bachelor’s degree. Ward eventually worked for the Texas Commission on Human Rights as an investigator and legal counsel. Another of the cadets, Melvin Murchison, became the first black athlete to play a varsity sport (football) at Princeton. Along those lines, the fourth black cadet, Arthur “Pete” Wilson played two seasons of varsity basketball, and even acted as the team captain.38 Interestingly, high-achieving black students who were admitted literally had to be “in the nation’s service” to attend Princeton.

Figure 2.1. In the nation’s service, James E. Ward (left) and Arthur J. Wilson, both class of 1947, took advantage of the U.S. Navy’s V-12 officers training program to become two of Princeton University’s first black graduates. Courtesy of the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University.

White veterans, who witnessed the service of black men during the war, moved to alter Princeton’s racial policies of admission. In 1946, several white soldier-students in coalition with several civilian-students formed an organization called the Liberal Union. In an attempt to enlighten the campus with respect to the abilities and equality of black people in general, the Liberal Union brought NAACP Executive Director Walter White (who had Caucasian physical characteristics) to campus to speak to the general student body. Sixty-two years later, Robert Rivers, a black observer from the town of Princeton, remembered the shameful treatment the executive director received upon arriving at campus. Rivers, who eventually attended and graduated from the university (and became its first black trustee), recalled “the scene where Princeton [University] students taunted and threw snowballs at the NAACP executive director.” The Walter White scene is notable on at least two levels. On the one hand, if Princeton were a place that pledged to forge the leaders of the future, it appeared that those future leaders had not yet matured. Indeed, heaving snowballs at an actual societal leader could be characterized as nothing more than juvenile. On the other hand, the fact that a dogged advocate of integration who happened to be black could speak on campus marked a shift in Princeton’s history.39

Even if slow and incremental, Princeton’s culture changed with the times. The first black undergraduate student that Princeton University admitted without impetus or assistance from the military was Joseph Ralph Moss. A resident of the town of Princeton, Moss arrived at the university in the fall of 1947. While he did not participate wholly in campus events, he did eventually join a campus eating club and even lived on campus at one point. The admissions officer who interviewed Moss noted that the student had a light complexion and a mother of “very high-grade.” The officer further observed that Moss’s brother, Simeon, had attended the graduate school as part of the G.I. Bill. Joseph Moss graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1951.40

Although Princeton desegregated in the immediate post–World War II era, it may not have done so out of sheer goodwill. An article in the Princeton Alumni Weekly pointed out that in 1947 state legislators rewrote the state’s constitution to explicitly prohibit racial discrimination.41 In doing so, state-funded institutions were required to adhere to the new policy regarding discrimination. Although Princeton was a private university, it did receive some funds from the state of New Jersey. Subsequently, Princeton more freely admitted black undergraduates.

One of those new black students was Robert Rivers (class of 1953). Like Robeson and Moss, Rivers grew up in Princeton. He, however, actually enrolled in the university. Rivers’s father worked at an eating club for decades and his mother was the maid for a professor for years; so the Rivers family understood full well what white students and faculty were capable of and what the very few black students who attended the university had to endure.42 Rivers arrived at the university embracing the spirit of pioneers like Jackie Robinson, Ralph Bunche, and Charles Drew. There was little comfort for him on campus, but his home in Princeton became one of the spaces where black students felt welcome for years to come. He watched as the members of the exclusively white eating clubs rejected his black peers. There were few exceptions for black students looking to be part of the clubs.

Eating clubs were not officially part of the university and it did not regulate them. As fraternity life was not available to Princeton students on campus, eating clubs provided much of the fun and extracurricular activity for students in the way that fraternities would. They also provided housing for upperclassmen. By rule, they were exclusionary, as the clubs used an interview and “bickering” processes to select members. Black students during the period, who numbered few, rarely showed interest in joining and were selected infrequently when they did. Arthur Wilson recollected being initially accepted by the occupants of Tiger Inn but then rejected because of the overriding will of the eating club’s all-white alumni, who did not want him to join. Tiger Inn members, apparently, did not have anything against black people in general because a black man (Rivers’s father) was a servant in the house for decades. It was the possibility that a black student who would not be acting in a service capacity might join the club that threatened the status quo. Wilson, although dejected, did gain membership to the Prospect Club, which welcomed him and Jewish students alike.

Black students, according to a 1995 Daily Princetonian article, lived in systematic isolation. The article claimed that black freshmen, even if they requested a roommate (which would have likely have been a white student), had to stay in single rooms. The policy changed during the 1960s, but in the eyes of Royce Vaughn, who graduated in 1953, the campus officials were clueless about his experience. Nearly four decades later, Vaughn said: “a counseling program was sorely missing in those days.” Considering the anxiety associated with being one of the few black students of campus, counseling would have benefited Vaughn and his predecessors. Charlie Shorter, who graduated nine years after Vaughn, stated: “some consideration by the university officials at some level as to the expectations for African Americans would have been nice.” Shorter noted that “there was nobody who really understood what it was about.” He recognized that he was in the midst of some of the best and brightest students in America, but he emphasized that the group “included a number of people who were bigots and racists and [who] made my life at Princeton in some respects miserable.”43 To achieve their goal of attaining a Princeton degree, the early black students, Vaughn said, “went through an experience that was painful and prolonged.”

As the university accepted more black undergraduates, it also observed changes regarding faculty demographics. Princeton hired its first black tenure-seeking faculty member during this period. On July 30, 1955, the black newspaper the Newark Herald proclaimed that “one of the most glorious chapters in the history of Princeton was written … when Dr. Charles T. Davis, a Negro, was appointed a member of the faculty of this famous University.”44 Davis, thirty-nine years old, had graduated from Dartmouth College and received a PhD from New York University. A Walt Whitman scholar and former army officer, he arrived at Princeton to teach English. His arrival was indeed historic, but it seemed to cause less friction than the arrival of black students.

During the 1940s and 1950s, few black students (undergraduate or otherwise) attended Princeton. The situation changed, however, in the 1960s. By then, Princeton alumnus and faculty member Robert Goheen had become president of the university. Born in India the son of American Presbyterian missionaries, during World War II Goheen rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army.45 Goheen’s worldview was somewhat more liberal than that of his predecessors. In terms of the university’s relationship to black students, Goheen attempted to change the university’s racially exclusionary image. In a moment of clarity he stated: “For the past decade, we have been terribly concerned with what we could do for students from underdeveloped countries. It took a shock (the civil rights crisis) to make us realize our problems at home.”46 President Goheen authorized a tutorial program for mostly black youth in the nearby city of Trenton, which had a significant black poor and working-class population, as a long-term approach to admitting more black students.47

The early 1960s saw further tentative admission of black students. One Daily Princetonian article noted that of the 1,202 applicants who were accepted for the 1963–1964 academic year, only ten were black. Although the number of accepted African Americans was small, the article claimed that no black student had been accepted in 1953, 1954, and 1959. The article blamed the unfriendly nature of the town of Princeton and the university itself, as well as the “scarcity of qualified Negroes, which is slowly being corrected.”48 To be sure, the town of Princeton had a history of segregation and discrimination against its black residents. The town’s treatment of African Americans, however, did not mean that the university had to be unwelcoming. Incidentally, the article also noted that of the class entering the 1963–1964 school year, 20 percent were the sons of alumni. The article did not mention the qualifications of the legacy students.

Years later, the Association of Black Princeton Alumni (ABPA) commissioned a survey of black Princeton alumni that revealed several interesting things about the experiences of students. The number of black students who attended Princeton did not increase significantly until after 1963, so the bulk of the respondents were still relatively young in their careers and not too far removed from life at Princeton. Because black students did not attend any of the Ivies in great numbers until after the mid-1960s, the ABPA survey is somewhat useful in assessing the experience of black students at peer institutions.49

The survey reported that most (78 percent of the respondents) of the black graduates came to Princeton from the East Coast. After graduating they “principally” lived in the Mid-Atlantic states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. Two-thirds of the respondents disclosed that they came from predominantly black neighborhoods and that their communities could have been characterized as low and middle income. When asked why they chose Princeton University, the answer was predictable. Fifty-seven percent said they were “attracted because of Princeton’s prestige and because of what the university could do for them.” Likely, the grand majority of students—irrespective of race—would have answered similarly. Black students coming from low to middle income neighborhoods and families, however, were well acquainted with what attending an Ivy League school could do to alter their life chances.50

The opportunity to attend Princeton came with significant emotional and mental costs, according to the survey. More than 90 percent of those surveyed remembered “observing at least a few separate instances of racial discrimination”; 46 percent remembered seeing more than five instances. Unfortunately for the students, it only takes one experience with racial discrimination to induce trauma and set into motion negative reactions. Students considered having to observe Confederate flags flying outside the windows of dormitories and eating clubs on their way to class racial discrimination. One student regretfully recalled having to confront “Southern attitudes” on campus.51 Charlie Shorter, in the class of 1962, called Princeton the “Northernmost of the Southern schools,” referring to its stance toward black people.

Following the lead of Goheen, who recognized the significance of the Civil Rights Movement, Princeton’s admissions office targeted black applicants. The director of admissions sent letters to 4,000 public and private high schools, notifying the school counselors of Princeton’s “search for Negro applicants.”52 The university also attempted to cultivate potential black students through the Trenton Tutorial Project, which involved university students and faculty members tutoring mostly underprivileged and black students at the nearby high schools. In 1963, over 140 Princeton students assisted the more than 200 Trenton students (a significant number of whom were black) who signed up for the project.

Although university officials encouraged the effort to racially diversify Princeton’s campus, there were students who still outwardly opposed integration. In March 1964, several university students created an organization called the Princeton Committee for Racial Reconciliation. Apparently, the members of the all-white group believed that the best way for the races to reconcile was to remain segregated. The group’s president, Marshall Smith, claimed the group represented the opinions of a third of the student population (in fact there were only fifteen members of the groups). “We just want to show that in the midst of all this sympathy for the Negro there exists some opposition on campus,” Smith explained, “Segregationists are not going to give up by default.”53 Hoping to contradict the “integrationist propaganda” to which Princeton students had been exposed, Smith’s group pointed to the controversial book by Carleton Putnam, Race and Reason, that attempted to confirm racial stereotypes regarding black people and to make the argument for segregation. The segregationist group claimed that Putnam’s work provided evidence of the ineffectiveness of social integration.

Taking advantage of the 1965 Higher Education Act, Princeton used a federal grant to reestablish a cooperative program with the nation’s first college established for black students, Lincoln College in Pennsylvania. Like Princeton, Lincoln had early ties to the Presbyterian Church, and Lincoln’s first president supported colonization as did several early Princeton trustees. In 1854, Princeton alumni helped to found the institution to educate black men, and the universities maintained a relationship throughout the years with Princeton men serving on Lincoln’s faculty and the board of trustees. In 1965, the $113,000 Higher Education Act grant allowed for a faculty and student exchange. Lincoln faculty came to Princeton to take graduate courses and teach specialized courses while Princeton graduate students had the opportunity to teach at Lincoln. Moreover, Princeton students and faculty members would have access to Lincoln’s African Studies collection. While select Lincoln faculty members had the chance to take advanced courses from Princeton, a critic of the exchange might have observed that the white Princeton students, acting as instructors, were able to “practice” on black Lincoln students and to exploit Lincoln’s special collections for the advancement of their own research agendas, which would allow the white Ivy League students (who would benefit from Princeton’s reputation) the chance to be in the forefront of a relatively new field of study. Critics may have charged that the exchange was hardly equal. Still, the president of Lincoln explained: “The benefits … to both faculty and students through [the] cooperative relationship between a great university such as Princeton and a small liberal arts college will be of incalculable” value.54

The Princeton-Lincoln exchange was one way to expose black students to Princeton, but there were others. Another source of exposure to the university was the Princeton Summer Cooperative Program (PSCP), which began in 1963 as an attempt to draw secondary students from the surrounding urban centers to Princeton to bridge the cultural and racial gap that existed. Officials believed that if the mostly black lower-income students spent time on campus they might learn what was necessary to eventually matriculate at Princeton or another higher education institution. In that way, Princeton was attempting to solve the problem of the ghetto by providing young people with potential options for their futures. There were similar programs at Ivy institutions, including Dartmouth’s A Better Chance and Columbia’s Project Double Discovery. The PSCP marked another step toward racial progress for the Ivy institution that had only desegregated less than twenty years earlier.

Historian Komozi Woodard, who participated in the PCSP at Princeton University in the summer of 1965, believed that it and similar programs were mostly positive, but they had drawbacks. He viewed the summer program at Princeton as an experiment to see if ghetto children could make themselves culturally worthy of elite universities and colleges.55 As a memo from the news office at Columbia explained about its program, “the premise is that a deprived youth with a college education will become a productive citizen, able to pull himself out of the environment from which he comes.”56 Other than a reference to an improvement in “lifestyle” that teachers observed in program participants, there was no explanation of what exactly the memo’s author meant by a “productive citizen.” The sentiment and language of the document, however, smacks of the Horatio Alger narrative, protestant work ethic, and Christian missionary zeal rolled into one. The programs were, indeed, missionary in nature, as representatives of predominantly white institutions of higher education went into the foreign lands of the ghetto to seek converts to the college way of life.

The officials, students, and administrators who applied for and funded the programs viewed the potential young participants as those who might not otherwise become productive citizens without their assistance. That is not to discredit the important work and efforts that the programs coordinated, but it does illustrate the way that even when couched within good intentions, public and private policies “othered” black and brown children from low-income households. By bringing them into the environment in which the nation’s wealthiest and whitest children dwelled, perhaps the children from the ghetto could eventually hope to be respectable, read the tone of the document.

Woodard, after completing the program at Princeton, eventually graduated from Dickinson College and earned a doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in history. Reflecting on his experience with the Princeton Cooperative Schools Program a half century later, he said: “It was a life changing experience for me because I thought I was an all-American boy, and that everyone in America lived like I did in the ghetto of Newark.” When he went to Princeton, however, he discovered he was wrong, and that “inequality was real.” Reading Michael Harrington’s The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962) while in the program bolstered his conclusion about the unevenness of life for him as a young black person from Newark and the majority of the white students who attended the Ivy League school in New Jersey. Woodard, who concluded he was not typical, was wrong to an extent. He was, in fact, an all-American boy, just not in the way the print and electronic media depicted Americans. Millions of citizens faced slum circumstances and toiled in the working class to make a living; he and his family were certainly not alone. Class differences—more than race—impressed him initially, Woodard recalled.57

As part of the Princeton program, Woodard also found out that some of the instructors were researching and tracking the participants. He remembered leaving campus without permission on a mission to meet girls with the other participants in the all-male program. When he returned, a white counselor exclaimed: “you ruined the experiment!” Woodard was confused by the statement. Upon investigation, Woodard believed he learned that both Princeton University and Dartmouth College were trying to use the summer program to test the assimilation model that had been used on Native Americans centuries before on black youth. Dartmouth, according to its charter, started as an institution whose mission it was to educate and assimilate Native peoples. Woodard sensed that the idea behind the “experiment” was to get black children away from what the designers of the program would have considered “pathological black culture” and bring them to the more reasonable and liberating campus of Princeton. Back then, Woodard admitted decades later, he felt like a guinea pig in the War on Poverty. Acting on his feelings, he and several other students rebelled with their behavior. The prospect of being experimented on caused him to question the purpose of education. In spite of his feelings then and decades later, the program, working in combination with his abilities, helped to advance his life chances.

One of Woodard’s inspirations in the PCSP was senior Robert “Bob” Engs, one of the two black student-counselors attending Princeton for the PCSP in the early 1960s. Engs’s upbringing was atypical, in that he grew up in Germany as part of a military family. He graduated from Princeton in 1965 and earned a PhD in history from Yale in 1972. He, like so many other black alumni of the Ivy League, went on to mentor younger generations of black scholars, who paid the favor forward to the generations of black learners that followed.58 Engs began doing so in the Princeton summer program, where he taught Woodard. It helped to have someone with whom Woodard and other black participants would relate racially.

With the Princeton administration continuing its desegregation effort at the high school level, university students dealt with the implications of the movement. Although a higher number of black students than ever before were attending Princeton, they did not always feel welcome. Harvard Bell, who was a sophomore in 1968, remembered Princeton as a “lonely” place, and he recalled feeling at times “unwelcome” and “under attack.”59 As it was, the arrival of black students set into motion a cultural experiment on Princeton’s campus that was ultimately positive but at times troublesome.

Princeton, said 1969 graduate Nathaniel Mackey, had a “southern gentleman” stereotype. By that, he meant southern white gentleman.60 Mackey claimed that many people associated with the university accepted the stereotype. The negative behavior that black students withstood included antagonistic attitudes and gestures toward the prospect of racial integration. Segregation and racism were widespread throughout the nation. The southern culture that celebrated slavery and the Confederacy was, however, particularly prevalent at Princeton as a member of the Ivy League, according to black alumni and white officials. One black alumnus remembered that when he arrived in 1965, Princeton boasted that “half of its [Princeton’s] students who died during the Civil War fought on behalf of the South.”61 In spite of the fact that officials walked the same paths and took in the same views as the black students, the flag of the nation that attacked the United States flew proudly in the Princeton sky. Black students saw that as an “affront” to their personhood.

It was not just the Confederate flag but the open hostility that black students faced from white students and professors that damaged their impression of Princeton. John Caldwell, class of 1968, remembered urine and garbage being thrown on black students walking beneath Rock Suite dormitory.62 In response, black students approached the white residents in the dormitory ready for a physical confrontation if necessary. Perhaps the white students who participated in the reprehensible acts were merely inebriated, or maybe they understood that it would be difficult for black students to compete scholastically if they had to concern themselves with getting to the classrooms without being dumped upon. In any event, it was left to the black students to “get over” the incident.

Then, there was still the issue of eating clubs. The ABPA survey indicated that 83 percent of the graduates refused to join an eating club at all. With the eating clubs as a very narrow option, socializing became difficult for black students. “There was essentially no social life,” remembered Shearwood McClellan who graduated in 1969, “you [black Princetonians] were really on your own.”63 Although most of the clubs, according to the survey were “cliquish,” McClellan’s classmate Brent Henry recalled that some “were more tolerant than others on issues of race and politics.” Henry said that he and his peers occasionally attended events at the Dial Lodge and the Campus Club on Prospect Avenue. In terms of the suffering that black people without an education experienced outside of Princeton, not being able to join or feel welcome at exclusionary eating clubs was seemingly insignificant, but having the liberty to be human everywhere black people existed was still important.64

By most accounts, 1968 was a year that stood out as both eventful and traumatic for the nation and the world. Popular leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, while students and other activists railed against the escalated war effort in Vietnam and for youth empowerment. Some Ivy League university campuses, like Columbia University, shut down because students rebelled against the university’s ties to the Vietnam War as well as what the students viewed as racist policies concerning Columbia’s expansion. At Cornell, black students took over offices to protest for Black Studies. Princeton students opposed similar ties to the university’s relationship with the Department of Defense. Indeed, Ivy League universities were not immune to the social unrest and uprisings that affected the rest of the nation. The Black Power Movement had reached college campuses along with a more militant cadre of black students.

In 1968, Princeton University offered courses that focused on black history and culture. That year, Henry Drewry, a black educator, became the director of the university’s office of teacher placement and preparation.65 Drewry, who had taught in the town of Princeton’s school district for fourteen years and as a lecturer on the university’s campus, made history at Princeton by teaching the university’s first black studies courses. He and his wife Cecelia offered two seminars, one covering Black American Writers and another dealing with Afro-American History. Considering Princeton’s past with regard to race relations, there was little surprise when news outlets noted that the courses were the first of their kind in Princeton’s then 222-year history. It should also be noted, though, that Henry Drewry was teaching a seminar in addition to his teacher placement duties with the university. The dean of Princeton’s college of arts and sciences stated that the introduction of the two courses would help the college in “establishing a more formal, comprehensive program relating to black culture.”66

Princeton was benefitting from the largesse of black faculty and staff. The Drewrys, a black couple, along with one of Princeton’s first administrators, Carl A. Fields, became default mentors to many of the black students who were experiencing homesickness and racism at Princeton. Fields was first hired in financial aid and then became the university’s first black dean. As is still the case with black education professionals, he became the advocate, confidante, surrogate parent, and champion of many black students who had no one else to whom they could turn. Fields, along with the Drewry family, helped to improve the experience of many students.

The homes of Fields and the Drewrys, like that of the Rivers family, became shelters. Realizing the importance of those connections, Fields formalized the mentoring relationships and provided safe zones for the students by creating a network of family homes in Princeton. As one student remembered, those families were there to provide “good meals” and a “sympathetic ear.”67 The families provided them with the same kind of hospitality that black families offered black students at Cornell University in Ithaca at the turn of the twentieth century.

Despite the progress that the university made, Princeton still faced racial problems. In October 1968, black and white students confronted each other in a campus dormitory. Upset about the volume at which white students played music at a mixer, several black students who lived in the dormitory first complained to the dormitory director and then met the white residents in their room. The white residents, according to a university investigation, made several “racially offensive remarks” to the black students, who left and returned to the room with several more of their fellow black students. While in the white students’ room, one of the black students used a knife to slash the stereo speakers. As the situation escalated, nearly fifty students altogether participated in the controversy, but there is no record of violence. While race may not have been at the root of the conflict, certainly race became an issue when the white residents, who hosted the party, used epithets to address the black students. Race may also have been a factor in the dormitory director’s refusal to reprimand the noisemakers or neglect of the situation altogether. To be sure, noise complaints are common in residential settings, but in this instance the race of the residents added a new dimension to the conflict. None of the students faced criminal charges.68

From the 1940s to the early 1960s black students struggled to even matriculate at Princeton; by the late 1960s, however, Princeton’s black students had established a unique identity for themselves. Because of isolation on campus and a growing black consciousness, black students bonded.69 Out of that bond, in 1967 black students established the Association of Black Collegians (ABC) as a local campus organization. With university funding, the new group attempted to aid in the social and academic acclimation of black students and to initiate dialogue with the surrounding black communities of Princeton and Trenton. The group’s founders viewed ABC “as a bloc, effecting policy both now and in the future.” Taking on the cadence of Black Power rhetoric, an early coordinator explained that “when something is going to be done, we are the ones who are going to have to do it.”70 With regard to the abysmal number of black students enrolled at Princeton, the members of the organization took up that ethic. ABC subsequently visited predominantly black high schools around the country during the winter breaks to recruit for the university.71

In addition to their high school visitation program, the members of ABC acted as on-campus hosts to potential black students. In February 1968, Princeton, in conjunction with ABC and Jim Brown’s Negro Industrial and Economic Union, sponsored twenty urban youth who visited Princeton. ABC members brought the potential students to the admissions office, where they underwent interviews. One of the most important aspects of ABC’s approach to recruitment was the fact that the members of the college group provided examples of black students who readily navigated what many black youth called the “system.” One of the only black admissions officials explained: “[the visiting young people] learned that ‘they could have higher education without losing their own black identity.’ ”72

Because the members of ABC took it upon themselves to ensure that Princeton became an option for other black students, in 1968, President Goheen and the elite institution saw the fruits of the black student group’s efforts. That school year, Princeton admitted seventy-six new black students while ninety-seven black men altogether attended Princeton, which marked a high for the university.73 Sociologist Jerome Karabel has argued that even more than the Civil Rights Movement of the South, the urban uprisings and Black Power Movement of the North influenced the decision of Ivy League universities to admit black students. The universities, Karabel asserted, were concerned that the rage of the urban poor might be waged on the elite white institutions of higher education if they did not attempt to improve ghetto circumstances by admitting students.74 As a result, black students, some of whom had witnessed violent rebellions in their neighborhoods and were sympathetic to the tenets of Black Power, arrived on Princeton’s campus.

Figure 2.2. One of the first black administrators in the Ivy League, Carl A. Fields (center) of Princeton University, attended the inaugural banquet of the Association of Black Collegians in May 1968. Fields is with the association’s president Paul C. Williams (left) and member Alan D. Buchanan. Courtesy of the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University.

Although very able as recruiters, ABC’s larger agenda extended further. The group saw itself as part of the tradition of black students and youth who changed society for the better. With that in mind, ABC, with the help of Carl A. Fields, organized a national conference that involved students from over forty universities and colleges.75 Under Fields’s tutelage, the members of ABC focused on the future of the “Negro undergraduate” with seminars concerning education, economics, politics, and community organization.

When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, ABC members led students in a boycott of classes.76 In an emotional letter to the school newspaper, the ABC expressed its sorrow and anger with the civil rights leader’s murder: “It is not one man, however guilty he may be, that murdered Dr. King. Rather, it is the society as a whole that we indict.” The group lamented that because of the “injustice of this society, black America is under no constraints to obey white America’s hypocritical laws. It is in America’s best interests that the black man revolts.”77 The ABC declared that “No black student will attend classes! No black student will work any job!” In order to avoid controversy, President Goheen provided his endorsement of the group’s actions.78

Members of the ABC looked beyond themselves toward the larger black freedom movement and fell in line with other student activists. Following the lead of Malcolm X, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the late 1960s sought to tie the struggle of black people in the United States to that of black people abroad.79 In taking a Pan-Africanist approach to the struggle, SNCC eventually called for an end to European colonization of African countries. As it was, black South Africans dealt daily with the impacts of colonization under apartheid—a racial caste system of governing that not coincidentally mirrored America’s Jim Crow laws and culture.

In the 1960s many African Americans who battled poverty and racism domestically also chose to denounce South Africa’s racist policies. As the United States officially desegregated, South Africa further entrenched its racial caste system. Organizations like the American Committee on Africa, which enjoyed the support of black fraternal and sorority groups, the National Council of Negro Women, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the Congress of Racial Equality, the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, registered their objections to apartheid. In 1962, the committee issued a resolution calling for black Americans to protest the mistreatment of Africans abroad, and three years later made recommendations to the federal government regarding apartheid.80 The United Nations general assembly also brought apartheid to the forefront in the early 1960s. Black politicians like Congressman Charles Diggs brought up the issue of apartheid to U.S. political officials who had previously turned a blind eye to South African policies.81 Tennis star Arthur Ashe was another who loudly protested against apartheid, as did the scholars John Henrik Clarke and C.L.R. James. Abroad, scholars in Britain opposed apartheid in a boycott of South Africa.82 Other anti-apartheid activists included the American student/athlete members of the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), which was led by former athlete and educator Harry Edwards.83

The members of the OPHR were not the only students to oppose what they viewed as immoral policy in South Africa. In 1968, black Princeton students, in alliance with white radical students, protested against Princeton University’s investment policy with regard to South Africa. In doing so, the student activists preceded the American collegiate anti-apartheid movement by nearly two decades.84 Furthermore, they set the stage for what would become a major battle for justice within the U.S. Congress in the 1970s and 1980s. Princeton students envisioned their anti-apartheid campaign as part of the international struggle for black freedom and the Pan-Africanist movement.

In April 1968, students at Princeton proposed that the university not invest any future funds into companies associated with the apartheid-sanctioning governments of South Africa and Mozambique. While students at Yale demanded a Black Studies program, and those at Columbia demanded that their university show more respect to its black neighbors in Harlem, students at Princeton insisted that the university divest $127 million from its financial portfolio.85 The students recognized that they had peers from nations like Tanzania and Kenya where Africans had won their independence from European colonists. Those African students interacted with black students born and reared in the United States and informed them of the human rights struggle that was occurring in southern African nations.86

Armed with the knowledge of history concerning segregation and apartheid, the students took action. ABC members and other anti-apartheid student demonstrators marched at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs—a school named for a man who reinstituted the American version of apartheid in the civil services—and caught the attention of university officials. Princeton authorities, aware of protests elsewhere that escalated to violence and destruction, attempted to defuse the rising controversy.

University officials formed a committee that included administrators, faculty members, and students to study the impacts of the school’s investments and the efficacy of divestment. In January 1969, the committee issued a report that claimed that the university had no investments in companies that “directly support the governments of southern Africa, or that have substantial operation in the region.”87 Furthermore, the committee reported, “the designated companies [that the students had identified] derive an average less than one per cent of their sales and profits from southern Africa.”

The student members of the committee refused to endorse the report, which explained that divesting might cause the university to lose the equivalent of 10 percent of its educational budget. Doing so, according the committee report, would necessitate the curtailment of programs such as urban studies and “important programs that make a direct contribution to the cause of racial justice such as the active recruitment and granting of scholarship aid to more black students, the establishment of closer working relationships with organizations in New Jersey concerned with racial problems, and other programs such as the summer program for the disadvantaged youth.” Asserting that divestment would be mostly a “symbolic gesture” anyway, the report suggested that such a gesture “would be a heavy price to pay.”88 What did a university creating leaders in the land of the free continuing to do business with apartheid-supporting nations symbolize?

The report placed the student opponents of apartheid in a moral conundrum. If they chose to push forward with their protests, then they might have won a victory for the image of the university and against what they perceived as evil. At the same time, by continuing their efforts they risked losing funding that was used to attract and cultivate potential black students. If the students abandoned their push against the university’s financial ties to apartheid South Africa and Mozambique, then they became implicated in a relationship they believed was immoral. Then, if the university acceded to the students’ requests, it risked the financial stability of the institution. Essentially, the authors of the report constructed a scenario in which only black people abroad or black people domestically could be helped, but not both at the same time.

Presenting a potential slippery slope regarding the negative impacts of divesting, the report speculated about what type of precedent divesting might set. It stated: “If a policy of using moral, social, or political criteria in investment in a number of different instances, including ‘munitions makers,’ companies with ‘unfair’ labor practices, companies dealing with discriminatory unions, companies with investments in Portugal, companies doing business with communist countries, etc.… No company is completely free of connections that might be morally-politically-socially objectionable to a significant part of the University community.”89 Such a burden would be too much for an educational institution, argued the report. The problem with the argument was that Princeton was not just an educational institution but also a mill for the nation’s future leadership. What lessons were those leaders to learn from the report’s stance on the university’s tie to apartheid?

On the anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination, the ABC led a boycott of classes and held an action. To point out the death that occurred because of white imperialism and antiblack racism, ABC members carried a coffin with a red, black, and green flag draped around it to the center of campus and held a silent vigil. They were growing tired of negotiating freedom with white decision makers.

By March 1969, the Princeton students (mostly black), who formed the group United Front, wondered if their university could afford to be a moral institution with regard to racism. President Goheen attempted to address the concerns of the students. As a matter of policy, he stated that Princeton “will not hold securities in companies which do a primary amount of their economic activity in South Africa.”90 Goheen noted that doing so constituted an “unusual commitment on the part of this, or indeed any, university.” The president also acknowledged the important contribution of the black graduate students, who sat on the committee to study the apartheid issue. He then pointed to the fact that the faculty voted overwhelmingly to reject gifts to the university from companies “doing a primary amount of their business in southern Africa,” and that he would recommend that the trustees adopt the policy. In addition, he pledged that Princeton would work with other educational institutions that stood against apartheid and followed through on Goheen’s pledge.

Finally, the president reassured the students who worried about the original report’s suggestion that changes in the university’s investment policies could lead to cuts in funding for the recruitment of black students. He expressed great respect for the “depth, intensity, and nature of concerns which moved the United Front” and the other black students who pushed the issue. “We can and will do more to enable all our students—black and white—to study and learn from the Afro-American experience. We can and will extend our current efforts to add more black faculty, students, and staff to the University community. We can and will support and encourage the efforts of students, faculty, and staff to work with local community groups on problems of mutual concern.”91 To bolster the president’s proclamations, in early March 1969 the Princeton faculty voted to approve an Afro-American Studies program for the university.92 As the story about the university’s ties to apartheid became national news, Goheen’s approach to the stirring controversy was open to scrutiny.93

Although positive in tone, the president’s message did not provide the anti-apartheid students with solace. For the members of the Unified Front, divesting was a clear issue of morality and societal values. To emphasize that point, black students disrupted a service at the university chapel. A representative highlighted a passage from the Bible: “what does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose is soul?” (Mark 8:36).94 Strategically, they chose a space where contemplation and reflection were requisite. They had tried meetings and committee work; the next step was to employ moral suasion in a sacred place.

Days later, on the morning of March 11, 1969, the ABC launched what it would later call a “symbolic gesture” by staging a demonstration on Princeton’s campus. Moving beyond moral suasion, fifty-five black student members of the ABC and five white members of the campus chapter of the national New Left organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) entered the New South building that housed some of the university’s administrative offices and chained the doors shut. They decided not to just sit in but to take over the building, making the demonstration that much more serious. In the cold early morning hours, the agitators approached the janitor, who was also black. It must have been interesting for the janitor to see students that early in the morning. They informed the custodian that they were commandeering New South and that he did not have to perform his duties that day. According to Brent Henry, the janitor said “cool” and left the edifice.95

Although not adversarial, ABC and SDS had not worked closely on any projects before the demonstration. In addition to ABC and SDS, the Pan-African Student Association and the New Jersey Committee for South Africa assisted in organizing the protest. As the sixty students demonstrated inside the buildings, fifty others (mostly SDS members) marched outside the hall. In a move similar to that of black student protesters at Columbia in 1968, ABC leadership asked the few white students who were in New South to leave so that the black students alone could express their disdain with the university’s decision not to completely divest.96 In this way, these young activists employed Black Student Power by strategically using their race as a lever for power in negotiation with the university. The black demonstrators still enjoyed the support of SDS and the Third World Liberation Front, which was another group of students that opposed Princeton’s ties to the apartheid governments. If the ABC members believed that the university maintained racist ties to oppressive governments of predominantly black nations, then they wanted to be at the forefront of the movement to illuminate and break those ties. The sentiment mirrored that of black youth who demanded Black Power around the nation. For those black youth and Princeton’s black demonstrators, it was necessary for black people to take the lead on issues that directly affected black people.

Figure 2.3. Off-campus activists support the United Front’s campaign against Princeton University’s investment in apartheid southern Africa. Courtesy of the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University.

Figure 2.3. (continued)

SDS and other supporters of the ABC held rallies throughout the day. At one rally a banner read in capped bold letters: “CRY, BELOVED PRINCETON.”97 Surrounding the refrain were the words apartheid, murder, fascism, oppression, suffering, racism, and misery.

The black students were alone in the building. ABC leader Jerome Davis stated to the growing crowd of onlookers: “We have taken this action to demonstrate our disgust as black people and as human beings.”98 The protesters pointed to what they believed was “outright and admitted moral inconsistency of the university’s commitment to mankind and the Government of South Africa.” The university committee that studied Princeton’s ties to apartheid explained that to divest would be financially prohibitive. To that notion ABC declared: “Morality has no price” and refused to leave the building until it decided to do so.99 The occupiers did not allow many people to enter the building; they had to be wary of undercover police and counter-protesters. Hoping to have their story told accurately, they allowed reporters from WNJR (a black operated radio station based in Newark) to enter, but insisted that other journalists conduct interviews from outside. When a reporter asked when they planned to end the demonstration, an ABC representative replied: “When we leave, you’ll know.”100

As was the case with the black students who occupied buildings at Columbia, Cornell, Howard, City College of New York, Rutgers, and so many other universities, the students at Princeton did well to make provisions for their demonstration. Princeton demonstrator Gerald Horne, who was among those in New South, observed firsthand the methods and tactics that students had used during the uprising at Columbia University the previous year.101 He knew that having a successful campaign required preparation for arrest, meals, lodging, and other practical matters. The student agitators who took over buildings elsewhere had community members to bring in food and supplies, but the Princeton students planned for such provisions. The leadership of the ABC chose New South for their demonstration in part because there was a cafeteria, but there were other reasons. There were no classrooms, so the takeover would not hinder instruction and learning; it was, after all, midterms. Also, the building only had three points of entry, making it easier to secure the place. An important step for the demonstrators was to not unnecessarily destroy anything or to create a mess that would create more work for the black custodian. As they reflected on what they had just done, the demonstrators contemplated next steps.

Figure 2.4. A member of the Princeton Association of Black Collegians holds a sign during the group’s protest to end the university’s ties to apartheid southern Africa in March 1969. Courtesy of the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University.

Figure 2.4. (continued)

In spite of the students’ resolve to stand for black freedom, President Goheen pressured them to leave by pointing to the university’s policy against taking over campus buildings.102 The president observed: “Many members of the university, members of the staff no less than students and faculty, are deeply troubled by this incident.” The demonstration, he suggested, had “the potentiality of kindling latent antagonisms and provoking unconsidered counteraction.”103 If the university did not divest, it also risked antagonisms and counteraction. Goheen declared: “The university cannot tolerate this seizure.… The students face penalties up to and including dismissal.” He added, “I don’t believe in offering amnesty.” The black student protesters had not asked for it.

Deliberate in their disobedience, the demonstrators operated on the first and seventh floors of the New South building. Those floors housed the university’s comptroller’s office as well as the university’s payroll offices. The comptroller oversaw stock transactions, which included those with the companies that maintained relationships with apartheid-sanctioned governments, and the payroll offices issued checks to university employees.104 ABC members understood well that if the university was making the potential loss of money a main issue with regard to divestment, then black students would attempt to gain control of the issue by denying the university’s access to money and the building. To that effect, the demonstrators succeeded in stopping business in the building. In addition to halting the operations of the comptroller and payroll offices, the student activists impeded the progression of admissions applications as well.105 This was significant in the sense that Princeton was competing against the rest of the institutions in the Ivy League for students. The demonstration, by delaying the admissions process, could have potentially made Princeton less attractive to prospective students.

Figure 2.5. Association of Black Collegians members outside New South building, where they protested Princeton University’s investment in apartheid southern Africa in March 1969. Courtesy of the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University.

Figure 2.5. (continued)

The goals of the ABC were threefold. First, the members of ABC wanted to express their dismay with what they viewed as the president’s inaction on the issue of South African divestment. Second, they wanted to highlight their commitment to raising the issue to the larger student body and all those who would listen. Third, ABC wanted to “sensitize as many individuals as possible to the need for serious moral commitment against racism throughout the world.”106 When the internationally acclaimed New York Times picked up the story, it brought light to the students’ struggle to sensitize the masses.107

At one point, there were hundreds of students and some faculty members outside the building observing the demonstration. Some disagreed with the tactics of the protesters but sympathized with their cause. One observing student said: “It’s just not pragmatic” to take over buildings, and suggested that the ABC “had to do something to keep the issue going.” Another student opined: “Just in itself, it’s tremendous.… It was great to see something like that happening here, seeing this place break out of its complacent attitude.” Regarding the ABC and SDS’s efforts, one student commented to a reporter that “the ABC guys are really concerned and committed on this issue.… The SDS seems to be more of a bandwagon-type group.” Still other students, frustrated with the disruption, unsuccessfully attempted to physically remove the demonstrators by attempting to open the doors.108 Under the leadership of student Rod Hamilton, who was in charge of security, the ABC protected their position and rebuffed the would-be intruders.

ABC evacuated New South twelve hours after the initial takeover. The group’s leaders claimed that the demonstrators did not leave for fear of punishment or arrest but rather because “the administration has already began to shift the emphasis on our protest away from [the] moral issues of South Africa to the legitimacy of our tactics.”109 Such a statement not only pointed up the seriousness of the students, but it also illustrated a strategy in black student activity whose origins dated back to the earliest parts of the modern Civil Rights Movement. That strategy was for demonstrators to focus onlookers’ attention on the issue without making the methods a distraction.

Interestingly, years later, Henry revealed an often overlooked facet of protesting: boredom. Drama did not fill every moment of the demonstration (and most actions). He and the other students realized that after having made the statement against apartheid and refusing to leave when the administration ordered them to, there was not much to do inside the building besides study. If the intention was to draw attention to immorality of apartheid and the collusion of the university with the racist system, then they accomplished that goal, reasoned ABC leaders. With that in mind, they decided to leave that night, after twelve hours, making the demonstration “a tidy event,” as Henry recalled.110

ABC leadership asserted that the takeover was only part of their larger movement. Although the students faced disciplinary consequences, they refused to recognize any punishment that the university imposed. “We cannot accept in good faith any so-called moral judgments made by such an immoral institution,” Rod Hamilton of the ABC stated.111 Realizing that a single takeover was not enough to change policy, the student activists explained: “The battle for disinvestment will not be won quickly, but it will be won.”

In a bold act, the white student members of the joint student-faculty disciplinary committee refused to participate in proceedings that would punish the demonstrators. Eventually, five black demonstrators were punished just as the spring break began and therefore did not miss any classes or activities. Perhaps more students would have been punished, but the disciplinary committee claimed that it could not identify any others. Although the black student demonstrators did not receive amnesty, they faced little to no punishment for their act of rebellion.112 Inasmuch, the university averted a potential crisis like those that occurred at universities around the nation.

Princeton, unlike some of the other universities that featured student disruptions, had voted—without the impetus of demonstrations—to not give academic credit for Reserved Officer Training Corps courses and to establish an Afro-American Studies program. With respect to the anti-apartheid protests, the administration wisely did not call police onto campus, which may have hastened or even provoked violence. Finally, the administration, particular President Goheen, reasoned with students regarding their demands that Princeton become a more “moral” institution. At some institutions, administrators refused to reason or negotiate with respect to any university policy.113

While disruptive, the activity of the black students who demonstrated improved the university. Gerald Horne, a demonstrator at Princeton in the late 1960s, believed that black students had to act “to put the elites [powerful white institutional officials] on alert that we [students] were not inert.”114 Indeed, in the twentieth century, black students moved from matriculation to activism at Princeton. Horne has noted that “activism is one of the best teachers.” His fellow activist, Henry, agreed: “When you come to a place like Princeton, your world vision expands,”115 which ideally should happen to all college students. In the case of Henry, Horne, Hamilton, and the other activists in ABC, their ideas of blackness expanded beyond the borders of the United States as Pan-Africanism gripped the progressive black activist community. In this case, activism taught students that their presence was not an end goal and that they should think outside of themselves. Activism also taught an elite white institution to improve its relationship with black people domestically and abroad.

The student activists did not get all they wanted but they made progress for black people on and off campus. In 1969, after graduating, ABC leader Brent Henry campaigned for and won a position as trustee of Princeton. Black students were infiltrating every level of the university. Henry commented on the liberal nature of some of the board members when he joined the body after graduating in 1969.116 Surely, some of the board members had been in their positions for years and had been aware of the experience of black students. Nearly all of the board members were alumni, so they saw the travails of the few black students during their time in school. The late 1960s must have been the moment that captured the officials’ desire to act.

Princeton did not observe the constant demonstrations that other institutions did during the period. The protesting black students at Princeton did not go as far in their actions as other students, in part because of the presence and advice of Carl A. Fields. Henry explained that Fields acted primarily as a mentor to the students but also as a liaison to the administration, which allowed for a certain amount of understanding between officials and students that was not always available at other institutions.117 About the small number of confrontations on campus, Fields said that one of his objectives was to “change the nature of confrontation” regarding black students and administrators. He pointed out that “there are a hell of a lot ways to be militant,” and that building takeovers, strikes, and physical displays were only a few methods.118 Noting that students at Princeton were not necessarily less militant than their peers at Northwestern University or San Francisco State College, he commented that “one of the reasons we haven’t had any more confrontations than we’ve had is not because our guys (black men on Princeton’s campus) are any more passive” than other campus activists “but because the University has created mechanisms that make confrontation unnecessary.” That served both Princeton administrators and students well because they could work toward agreement on issues in a less dramatic way than was common elsewhere.

By 1970, the president of Princeton and all other school officials had an awareness of the experience of black students and felt pressure to improve the situations of the students on campus. Goheen remarked in his annual report of 1968–1969 that “differences in [the] previous experience and background between white and black students are likely to produce suspicions, hostility, and forms of intolerance.”119 Speaking to the behavior of white students, the liberal president wrote: “Too few white students, I think, have an adequate conception of the black students’ situation on campus.” He could have said the same about white officials. Without an adequate conception, white students, the president surmised, could “scarcely predict their behavior on the blacks.” As a result, Goheen explained, “The opportunities and scope for misunderstanding and mutual distrust in such a situation are very great.”

The president was correct; black students suffered from the misunderstanding. So much so that one student said this about Princeton, misunderstanding, and mistakes: “Education is the opportunity to make mistakes. The bigger the error made, the better the education received. So essentially,” he wrote, “Princeton has been one the biggest mistakes of my life.”120 The characterization of his choice to attend the Ivy school was likely not typical of most black students, but it did represent the thoughts of some. The ultimate question for them at the beginning and end of their time at Princeton was: What were they willing to bear to be a Princetonian?

The relative peace at Princeton regarding black activism carried into the 1970s. Henry also theorized that higher numbers of black students and socioeconomic class played a role in the peace that resumed on campus in the 1970s. In Henry’s graduating class (1969), there were fourteen black men. The number of black students rose exponentially in the years following 1965. During the late 1960s and early 1970s Princeton pursued black students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Henry speculated that with more black students enrolled there was a looser bond than when there were fewer students, who could remain tighter as a group. The students who came before 1965 were also mostly black middle and working class, which allowed them to initially relate to each other better than when a more economically diverse body of black students arrived on campus, he thought. Henry did not mean that students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds did not get along with those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, but rather that their economic class status played a part in how they approached life at Princeton. Framing his thoughts as conjecture, he supposed that students from working class and poorer families were perhaps less likely to engage in protest to protect their student status. They might have thought, “I can’t afford not to be here” because they knew that finishing at Princeton would present opportunities to improve life for their families.

Ralph Austin, from the class of 1973, represented one of the students from a lower-income household. He grew up in Trenton, where he had observed ghetto life. He described the environment at home and at Princeton as like “night and day” and recalled it was almost as if he had gone from “the ghetto to utopia as far as the surroundings.”121 This was not, though, his first experience with Princeton as a town or university. He had family members who made deliveries to the eating clubs and Austin had also participated in the summer program that brought inner-city black youth to campus to take courses. This was the same program in which historian Komozi Woodard participated as a boy. Knowing something about the campus helped ease his mind when he finally enrolled. Still, he had to confront the history of the school, when he lived in a dormitory that at one point in history, Austin claimed, housed enslaved people. In spite of being relatively acquainted with the campus, much of the scene was new to him.

The stark whiteness of the institution was obvious and Austin also took notice of the nuances in the socioeconomic class status of black students. He said that some of the black students “had some money,” which made them different from the black people he knew in Trenton, who were “poor.” Austin admitted to being a little intimidated by the prep school students, some of whom were black. He used their background in contrast to his as motivation and inspiration. “My whole attitude was hey, I came from an inner city high school and I can compete with you guys and you come from prep school, so I think I’m doing better than you are.” Other students from his background, he claimed, shared that attitude. To make money, he worked as a waiter in an eating club. The presence of the ABC, which included black students from all backgrounds, reassured him that there was a network of support. In his mind, the network of ABC and “being in the midst of the black revolution” were enough to assuage some of his anxiety of being different racially and socioeconomically.

Henry had a final thought about the number of demonstrations in the 1970s. Injecting a bit of humor, he suggested that a lot of the demonstrating and protesting that the young men did at Princeton in the 1960s was just “pent up whatever,” and that when Princeton finally invited women to enroll, the university relieved some of that tension.122 The entrance of women certainly changed the dynamics of campus life, but whether they helped with the “pent up whatever” is debatable. Women Princetonians faced unique circumstances and resisted in their own ways and with others. Black women in the Ivy League and the “Seven Sister” schools were often participatory and in the leading roles of student actions. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, survival was a priority for most women in the Ivy League.

At Princeton, women did not enroll until 1969 and the transition was not always smooth for them. Mistreatment, rejection, and discomfort were not reserved for black male students. Women had been able to attend Princeton in the past, but they could not officially graduate. The idea to become coeducational was not always popular among the male Princetonians. One alumnus from the class of 1920, E. S. Hubbell, who represented the Denver Committee for the Preservation of Princeton, was upset when he learned of the decision. He remarked that “Princeton Tradition” was important and “precious.”123 Princeton, he emphatically stated, “has been a male domain; it must remain so.” At stake was the manhood of the “traditional” students, Hubbell claimed. College should be a place where a boy is allowed to develop his manhood because after his time at the university, “he is forever lost in a feminine world,” according to the alumnus. Hubbell clarified, though, that he was not a “woman hater” because he was married with two daughters.

Hubbell was not alone in his opinions. George Hammond Jr. in the class of 1940, concurred, stating: “Male isolation is the big, contributing aspect to the success of his education.”124 It seemed as though Hammond believed that men would not be able to control themselves with women present. He said the Princeton man had a reputation for being a “dashing, undisciplined fellow” in his time. Hubbell and Hammond’s voices were two of a number of diverse voices on the issue of coeducation, but the notion of gender equality in admissions prevailed. The one-time bastion for white men was crumbling, and Princeton welcomed its first official class of women in the fall of 1969. Black women were part of that class, and they experienced multiple levels of bigotry.

Vera Marcus from Birmingham, Alabama, was the first black woman to enroll, attend, and graduate from the university. Her family lived modestly as her father was a minister, janitor, and street sweeper; her mother was a beautician. Prior to enrolling at Princeton, Marcus was one of the first black students to attend a newly desegregated high school in Birmingham, so the distinct feeling of isolation and being the “other” was familiar to her.125 Because of her forced solitude, she focused on her academic achievement. Marcus’s performance, she believed, was the reason that Princeton recruited her with a scholarship. She had not thought to apply to Princeton initially, but once she received an offer letter, she was New Jersey bound. Being the first black woman to graduate from the Ivy League institution never occurred to Marcus before she actually came to campus.

As she was part of the first class of women officially enrolled as Princetonians, she regularly confronted sexism. The eating clubs, which were historically problematic for black students, did not allow women to join either. The entire lifestyle that some of her white peers maintained was completely outside of her worldview. She commented that at Princeton, she experienced “first-hand what life could be like if you were among the haves” in contrast to the have-nots.126 Those who joined eating clubs had a privilege that others did not. Marcus, who came from a city where black girls were murdered in a church a mile away from her home in 1963, recollected that in high school and college she was not trying to be a hero, but rather she just wanted to “stay alive.” Looking back on her academic career, she explained that the last time she had felt normal was when she was eleven years old and attending her all-black elementary school. There, she was merely another student. That was not the case at Princeton for Marcus. As one scholar described the experience of early black Cornell University students, black students in the Ivy League were “part and apart” from their institutions. Sadly, Marcus stated, her college career was “colored by that loneliness,” and it was intensified by the fact that there were only two other black women in her class.

Another black Princeton alumna, Caroline Upshaw, who graduated a year after Marcus, discussed the modern concept of intersectionality when she recalled her time at Princeton. It was difficult for her to face the reaction of not only a majority of white people but also a majority of men to her as a “minority, not only as a woman, but as a black” person.127 This difficulty manifested in the ignorance of her peers and slights with which she had to cope. “I have been confronted by people who have asked me to let them watch me wash my hair … to watch me comb it, even touch it,” she said of her interaction with white Princeton students. Again, in light of the high rates of poverty and death that black people endured in the urban sections of Trenton, Patterson, and Newark, the rude and discriminatory behavior that Upshaw tolerated may have seemed minor, but her white peers questioned and challenged her intimate humanity. Aside from being annoying, the suggestion to watch the student do her hair was voyeuristic, objectifying, and dehumanizing. It was quite possible that the white students who made such requests had never been around black women before coming to Princeton. That was a result of the systematic subjugation of black people that legal and de facto segregation cultivated. Having grown up accustomed to American apartheid, white students could not help but view black students and especially black women as foreign objects.

White students, according to Marcus, were not the only ones that caused some black women to feel different. Marcus claimed to observe a recognizable distance between black men and women at Princeton in the first years of coeducation. “The black men were more like the white men than they were like us,” she asserted.128 In clarification, she noted that the “division at Princeton was more distinctly along gender lines than racial ones.” She suggested that at least black men somewhat fit the centuries-old male template of Princeton, but black women were nearly the antithesis of what Princeton had always been. As someone who had fought in the black freedom struggle in the South, she had not foreseen having to fight battles over gender in the North. That was an additional stressor for black women like her.

There were few people at the institution who could empathize with black students when they experienced or observed racism. The 1977 ABPA survey showed that most black students had one or no black professors throughout their college years. The presence of black professors and administrators has proven effective in the retention rates of students and their presence was no less essential then. In that regard, the culture and history of the university was clearly not accommodating to black students.129

The long-standing tradition and culture of Princeton affected black students in the postwar era. The struggle to change the university brought them together to confront issues of racism and isolation, and that created a special bond for them. The intense college experience, however, also disaffected many of the black students. The feelings the black alumni had about their alma mater had implications. For many, their relationship to Princeton paid off in terms of mutual benefits. Princeton officials could boast that the university had evolved, and black alumni could tout their Ivy League credentials when embarking on new life endeavors.

Life for many black students was complicated at Ol’ Nassau. They could distinctively remember their travails; however, those memories did not prevent some from giving back to the university. Remarkably, 28 percent who responded to the 1977 ABPA survey said that they participated in annual giving to the university. The survey suggested that the students who remembered having a more positive experience at the university were more inclined to donate money, while those who merely “survived” the university gave less or not all. Perhaps one of the best indicators of the relationship of Princeton University to black people came in the response to the question of whether the respondents would you send their children to the university. Almost two-thirds (62 percent) said that they would encourage their children to attend Princeton. Only 7 percent stated outright that they would not send their children to the university. Those in the remaining percentage were not sure if they would or would not.130 Vera Marcus articulated one sentiment among the graduates: “I’m very proud to have gone to Princeton.… But it could have been so much more.”131

As it is, Princeton University is still an elite and exclusive primarily white institution. The institution that was once the southern-most Ivy, however, now touts diversity as one of its main values. It took the efforts of students—particularly black students—to improve Princeton’s reputation with regard to race and to move the institution closer to morality. In this case, morality meant admitting American citizens who happened to be black, including the experience of African Americans in the curriculum, and reconsidering the institution’s financial support of apartheid. When they made a stand for international black rights, those who came in the postwar period followed in the footsteps of intellectual and activist Paul Robeson, who lived in the town of Princeton but did not have the opportunity to attend the university. Undoubtedly, black students helped Princeton University to be “in the nation’s service and in the service of all nations.”