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