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6Results for "August 27, 1904"
Stories
Erased Pasts and Altered Legacies: Princeton’s First African American Students
by April C. Armstrong | Reconstruction to Present (1865-)
In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, several African American men attended Princeton as graduate students. Princeton president Woodrow Wilson’s administration may have attempted to erase their presence from institutional memory, creating an inaccurate historical justification for excluding black students from the university.
Reverend I. W. L. Roundtree
by April C. Armstrong | Reconstruction to Present (1865-)
Reverend I. W. L. Roundtree, who attended the Princeton Theological Seminary in the 1890s and received a Master’s degree from the College of New Jersey in 1895, was one of Princeton’s earliest African American graduates. He may also have been the first and only former slave to graduate from the college.
The Murder of Frederick Ohl
by Grace Masback | Reconstruction to Present (1865-)
In 1895, African American Princeton resident John Collins shot and killed white Princeton student Frederick Ohl. The racially biased news coverage surrounding Collins’s trial illustrates racial tensions still present on campus and in town thirty years after the end of the Civil War.
"The Celebrated Alexander Dumas Watkins": Princeton's First Black Instructor
by R. Isabela Morales | Reconstruction to Present (1865-)
Alexander Dumas Watkins (1855-1903), a self-taught biologist, conducted significant scientific research alongside Princeton University professors from the 1880s until his death in 1903. Despite holding no formal academic position, Watkins worked in Princeton’s laboratories and taught courses as the University’s first Black instructor—and the last until the 1950s.
Strategies for Escape: A Study of Fugitive Slave Ads (1770-1819)
by Andre Fernando Biehl | Colonial & Early National (1746-1820)
Runaway slaves from the Princeton area used sophisticated knowledge of the late-18th and early-19th century’s changing legal and political landscape when they planned their escapes, forcing slave-owners to acknowledge their resourcefulness and determination to liberate themselves.
Primary Sources
"Rev. I. W. L. Roundtree Has Risen From Slavery's Estate"
August 27, 1904 | Reconstruction to Present (1865-)
Newspaper article profiling I. W. L. Roundtree, a late-19th century Princeton graduate who was born a slave.