"The Celebrated Alexander Dumas Watkins": Princeton's First Black Instructor

Introduction

Alexander Dumas Watkins was 22 years old when New York City police arrested him at his home in 1874.[1] He lived with his mother Rachel in west Chelsea, close to the sawmills, lumberyards, ironworks and factories that drew working-class New Yorkers to the neighborhood with promises of industrial jobs.[2] Watkins himself was a draftsman, preparing detailed technical plans and sketches for one or more of the nearby businesses.[3] To the officers who arrested him, however, the young African American man was merely a criminal.

The charge was theft—“attempted grand larceny in the second degree.”[4] Perhaps Watkins had been desperate for money, unable to support himself and his mother on his own. Or perhaps he hadn’t committed any crime at all, and was the victim of mistaken identity or the biases of a racially prejudiced police force. Whatever the case, on a spring day in 1874, Watkins was convicted and sentenced to two years and six months at New York’s notorious Sing Sing Prison.[5]

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After his release from prison in 1876, Watkins was unable to find work as a draftsman again. A convicted criminal now, he was compelled to accept menial work as a janitor at Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital.[6]

He wouldn’t be a janitor for long.

At Bellevue, Watkins would observe medical procedures firsthand, eventually taking up the scalpel himself. By the 1880s, he’d be a key laboratory assistant at Princeton, contributing to early malaria research. He’d conduct experiments and demonstrations, lecturing the school’s all-white student body on biology and anatomy.[7] His work would be cited in Scientific American and the Journal of the American Medical Association.[8] And when he died in 1903, he’d be remembered as “the only Negro who has ever acted in the capacity of instructor in Princeton University.”[9]

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Watkins wasn’t the first African American man to conduct scientific research at Princeton. Sam Parker provided invaluable research assistance to Princeton’s Chair of Natural History (and future Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute) Joseph Henry in the 1840s, and Alfred N. C. Scudder may have worked alongside astronomy professor Stephen Alexander in the 1860s. Like Parker and Scudder, Watkins held no official academic position. He never appeared in University catalogues as a member of the staff, and would be largely erased from Princeton’s institutional memory after his death.

Yet during his lifetime, he was a well-known, well-respected scientific researcher. Alexander Dumas Watkins’s skill and ingenuity won him recognition from New Jersey and New York’s scientific communities—a remarkable accomplishment at a college known for its conservative views on race, at a time when racial violence, segregation, and a hardening color line increasingly pushed African Americans to the margins of society.

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Bellevue Hospital

Watkins’s scientific career began with Dr. William Henry Welch.

Welch joined the staff of Bellevue Hospital (now a part of the New York University Medical School) in 1878. Trained in Europe and conversant in new techniques and technologies transforming medicine, Welch returned to New York with dreams of an institute that would incorporate all the most modern advances in medical research.[10] Instead, he got a laboratory converted from an ice cream parlor on the hospital’s first floor.[11]

Nevertheless, Welch brought to Bellevue what he’d learned abroad: advanced microscopy, in-depth study of tissues and cellular breakdown, diagnoses based on research into the pathology of disease.[12] He enlisted his sister in upstate New York to send him frogs so his medical students could practice the art of dissection—as he’d found, to his disappointment, that these would-be doctors were “hopelessly unequal” to examining human specimens.[13]

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Alexander Dumas Watkins, however, was entirely up to the task. As Bellevue’s janitor, Watkins had access to the hospital’s laboratories, and he spent a considerable amount of time observing Welch conduct autopsies, embalm bodies, and practice giving inoculations. Certain he’d seen enough to do the procedures himself, Watkins reportedly distributed handbills to local undertakers, offering to train them in Welch’s embalming methods.[14] Welch put an end to the advertisements, but Watkins’s claims must have intrigued him. With a skilled draftsman’s steady hands, Watkins demonstrated on a cadaver for Welch. According to the doctor, "his technique on the whole was admirable."[15]

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Welch’s approval gave Watkins entrance into the doctor’s inner circle.[16] Though not a student himself, Watkins would have interacted with Welch’s pupils—including William Libbey, a Princeton instructor who taught geography and histology, a field of anatomy focusing on tissue structure.[17] Welch had accepted Libbey as a student for a calculated reason, writing his sister that: “It is decidedly for my interest to take him, as he will probably be an influential man at Princeton, and is to take a leading part in the new biological course.”[18] The son of a wealthy Princeton trustee, Libbey had the connections and influence to promote medical and biological study at an important institution.[19] Welch, who would go on to found Johns Hopkins University, certainly approved.

But Libbey’s elite position and interest in the “Natural Sciences” also benefitted Watkins. And when he left Bellevue to return to his position at Princeton, Libbey invited the 30-year-old janitor to join him.[20]

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Princeton University

Watkins and his wife Emma (pregnant with their first child) left New York for Princeton, New Jersey in 1885 or 1886.[21] At the university, Watkins worked at the histological laboratory in Nassau Hall’s west wing—not as a custodian, but a “Laboratory Assistant.”[22] He likely prepared materials and equipment for Libbey’s histology classes: embalming animals for study, cutting and staining tissue to create slides for students, and demonstrating the use of microscopes, among other tasks.[23]

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Students reportedly visited Watkins at the laboratory, “seeking aid in difficult problems,” and he began to tutor “some of the students who were back in their work.”[24] But Watkins also lectured on Professor Libbey’s behalf, earning the students’ respect with his encyclopedic knowledge and “sly humor.”[25]

According to H. G. Murray (an alumnus from the class of 1893), Watkins “appeared able to define anything he saw under the lens”—“even a bit of cuticle one of the boys supplied” as a joke.[26] And on another occasion, when a student returned to lecture after cutting class for several days, Watkins simply glanced at him and quipped “absence makes the heart grow fonder,” before returning to his demonstration.[27]

Watkins’s skill with a scalpel impressed the students. As Murray recalled decades later:

To see him slice to one-thousandth part of an inch the cardiac muscle of a shark was a revelation in accuracy.[28]

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Watkins also worked with another Princeton professor, George Macloskie, who taught advanced biology courses.[29] Macloskie’s own academic research centered on insects (according to one newspaper, he’d written more than 25 papers on the subject by the 1890s), with a particular focus on mosquito anatomy.[30] In the summer of 1888, he became the first person to identify and describe the mosquito’s “venomo-salivary duct” and glands, its “poison-apparatus.”[31] The duct was tiny, less than eight microns in diameter.[32] (In other words, the size of a red blood cell.) Spotting these miniscule anatomical features took a powerful microscope and a pair of very steady hands—both of which he found at Princeton’s histological laboratory.

In his 1888 article in the American Naturalist, Macloskie thanked “Dumas Watkins” for his contribution to the discovery: Watkins had dissected the mosquito himself, creating “a set of excellent sections” (slices of tissue) that Macloskie used to identify the poison duct and glands.[33] Considering his background as a draftsman, Watkins may also have created the anatomical drawing printed alongside the article.

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Macloskie’s article was significant enough to merit publication in several other journals, including the Scientific American supplement in 1889.[34] But it may have been quickly forgotten if, in the late 1890s and early 1900s, physicians and researchers hadn’t discovered the role of mosquitos in transmitting malaria to humans.

Malaria had devastated human populations for thousands of years: mentions of the disease appear in clay tablets from Mesopotamia, ancient Chinese and Indian writings, and the Iliad, among others sources.[35] By the 19th century, malaria had spread across the globe, with more than half of the world’s population at risk of contracting the disease.[36] According to some estimates, more than three million people died from malaria in the year 1900 alone.[37]

Suddenly, Macloskie’s descriptions of mosquito anatomy were of more than academic interest—they were a matter of life and death. In 1900, the Journal of the American Medical Association discussed his contribution to malaria research, with Dumas Watkins named and credited as a colleague.[38]

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Throughout the 1880s and '90s, Watkins also worked alongside Macloskie outside of Princeton, at the “Seaside Assembly” in Avon-By-The-Sea, New Jersey.[39] A summer school at a resort on the Jersey shore, the Seaside Assembly ran from July to September, bringing college professors together to conduct research and lecture on topics as varied as “biology, art, music, expression, mathematics, literature, philosophy, chemistry, Bible study, geology, psychology, history, pedagogics, writing, phonography and cookery” (just to name a few).[40]

Macloskie served as “dean” of the School of Biology, working from “an airy and well-equipped laboratory on the shores of Shark River.”[41] Fellow researchers included professors and doctoral candidates from Rutgers and Williams College along with “A. Dumas Watkins, of Princeton College,” the laboratory’s “curator and collector.”[42] At Avon-By-The-Sea, Watkins collected flora and fauna—filling “a chaos of glass jars” with algae, seaweed, other “marine specimens” (or as one journalist described them, “various hideous animals”), as well as lichen, ferns, mosses, and pine flora.[43]

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As other professors lectured the men and women who patronized the Assembly, Macloskie’s “little group of scientists” worked diligently, “completely and gloriously happy” to “pore over quaint bugs and beasts.”[44] And though Watkins may have avoided some parts of the Assembly grounds—like the amphitheater, decorated as a local minstrel troupe’s idea of “a negro hut”—at the laboratory on Shark River, he held a position even higher than at Princeton University.

He was named a member of the “faculty.”[45]

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Conclusion

Alexander Dumas Watkins died in 1903, around 50 years old, and obituaries in papers across the country eulogized “the brightest old Negro in Princeton.”[46]

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Some of them made mistakes: the New York Times, for example, said that Watkins was only permitted to tutor “the less intelligent students in histology,” rather than step in for William Libbey during his regular lectures.[47] Others dated Watkins’s time at Princeton to the mid-1890s or early 1900s—a decade or more later than his actual arrival.[48] But all acknowledged his “profound knowledge,” “proficiency in the science of histology” and development of numerous “clever experiments.”[49] And as the New York Amsterdam News asserted in 1938:

Many graduates … will probably agree that they won their ‘sheepskins’ through the kindly and patient assistance of Alexander Dumas Watkins.[50]

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Yet by focusing on Watkins’s race, expressing incredulity that Princeton men required a “Negro’s Aid” to obtain their diplomas, the obituary writers overlooked a key part of Watkins’s story: that most of the people who encountered him through the written accounts of his research never knew he was African American at all.

In his 1888 article on mosquito anatomy, George Macloskie identified Watkins as an employee of the Princeton Histological Laboratory—no other information necessary. Likewise, none of the numerous articles and advertisements for the Seaside Assembly mentioned Watkins’s race. He was simply “Mr. Dumas Watkins, of Princeton College,” praised as “a first-class collector” and curator of marine life.[51] As late as 1930, William Henry Welch (Watkins’s first mentor) would recall him in a speech at the New York Academy of Medicine, not as a Black man who once worked as a janitor, but as “the celebrated Alexander Dumas Watkins.”[52]

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When Princeton graduate H. G. Murray wrote a “sketch” of Watkins for the Princeton Alumni Weekly in 1940, he declared (in what he doubtless considered praise):

Peace to his ashes, for he was a white man, though his skin was black.[53]

Murray’s dubious compliment hit closer to the truth than he knew. Prominent figures in the scientific community accepted Watkins as an equal in knowledge and skill—never referencing his race. As a result, the white scientists, editors, and members of the general public who saw Watkins’s name in journals and newspaper articles in the 1880s and ‘90s very likely assumed that he was a white man.

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Ironically, this may be one of the reasons many of his contributions were lost to historical memory for more than a century. None of Watkins’s obituaries mentioned his work with William Henry Welch at Bellevue Hospital, or George Macloskie at Princeton and the Seaside Assembly. Focused only on his role as a “negro instructor,” they failed to connect their image of Watkins with the Watkins whose name had appeared alongside Princeton professors’ for two decades.[54]

Alexander Dumas Watkins’s story was more complicated—and more remarkable—than anyone in Jim Crow America was ready to accept.

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