Upending the Ivory Tower. Stefan M. Bradley

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ