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Nassau Hall’s memorial atrium—built in the 1920s—reflects the era’s reconciliationist politics, erasing the role of slavery and emancipation in the Civil War and granting moral equivalency to the Union and Confederate causes.

During the early 1920s, Princeton students came into contact with local members of the Ku Klux Klan. Their interactions with the Klan reveal both curiosity about the organization and anxiety about the following it could develop on university campuses.

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.

In 1922, Princeton affiliates founded a chapter of the Immigration Restriction League (IRL) on campus, advocating for restrictions on non-western European immigration into the United States. Though the organization dissolved in 1924, the IRL leaders’ commitment to white supremacy extended into their professional lives as influential 20th-century scholars.

In 1948, after a century of segregation, the town of Princeton integrated the white Nassau Street School and the black Witherspoon Street School with a system called the “Princeton Plan.” Contemporary reactions to desegregation revealed Princeton’s racial divisions as well as the black community’s commitment to education.