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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.

When three Princeton students organized a petition protesting the acquittal of Emmett Till’s murderers in 1955, classmates dressed in KKK robes threatened their lives. Though the campus newspaper and Princeton administration characterized the incident as a “prank,” the event revealed deep divisions on campus over issues of racial justice.

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.

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.