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