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