4Results for "October 16, 1909"
Stories
Erased Pasts and Altered Legacies: Princeton’s First African American Students
|
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.
James McCosh and Princeton’s First Integrated Classrooms
|
James McCosh, Princeton’s eleventh president (1868-88), admitted African American graduate students into his classes and strongly criticized slavery and the Confederacy—convictions that angered white southern students attending the college after the Civil War.
The Murder of Frederick Ohl
|
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.
Primary Sources
"Murderer Freed, Will Work Here"
|
Article announcing the release of John Collins, an African American man convicted of the murder of a Princeton undergraduate in 1895.