Integrating Princeton University: Robert Joseph Rivers

A Southern School

In the 19th century, Princeton University earned a reputation as a school particularly welcoming to slaveholding southern students. (As one South Carolinian wrote, Princeton was “almost a Southern college.”) In the 20th century, Princeton strongly identified with this part of its past, working to ensure that white students from the former Confederate states would feel at home. When changes to state law required Princeton to accept African American students, the school struggled to adapt to the upending of its tradition as a northern stronghold for southern racial mores. As a result, its first Black students faced unique challenges.

Princeton’s first African American undergraduates were brought in as part of a Navy training program during World War II. In 1945, trustee Laurence G. Payson wrote to a fellow member of the class of 1916, John McFerran Barr, to explain the presence of Black students in response to objections from students and alumni:

When the personnel [for the Navy unit] arrived its members included, unbeknownst to us in advance, four negroes.[1]

Princeton was known to be wary of challenges to its traditions. In 1935, Dean Radcliffe Heermance (who headed the Office of Admission) revoked a Black student’s offer of admission when he was made aware of the man’s race.[2] But when Payson wrote his letter in 1945, the New Jersey legislature had recently passed a law requiring tax-exempt institutions not to discriminate on the basis of race. The Office of the President, not Heermance’s Office of Admission, would evaluate all future applications for admission from African American men. In this changing context, Payson wrote:

If Princeton were to stand against the negroes who were admitted under the Navy War-time ROTC the Trustees would be in a very difficult spot.[3]

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A Defining Moment

The dividing lines in Princeton were starkly black and white before the Navy and external and internal pressures began to upend the status quo. Robert Joseph Rivers, who graduated from the recently integrated Princeton High School in 1949, had attended the segregated Witherspoon Elementary School as a child. As was the case with many of the town’s Black residents, the Rivers family made their living working for Princeton University. Rivers’s grandfather had planted the elm trees lining Washington Road; his mother was the live-in maid for engineering professor Lewis F. Moody; his father worked as a servant at the Tiger Inn and as a dormitory janitor; and aunts and an uncle tended to students at McCosh Infirmary.[4] But Rivers saw the presence of Black Navy V-12 students at the prestigious university as a promise of new possibilities.

One voice calling for change from within Princeton University had a direct impact on Rivers. Frank Broderick (‘1943), chair of the Daily Princetonian, shook the campus in 1942 with a three-part series of front-page editorials under the header “WHITE SUPREMACY AT PRINCETON.”[5] Broderick’s scathing columns called for an accounting of Princeton’s sins: “Princeton continues its principle of white supremacy and, in an institution devoted to the free pursuit of truth, implicitly perpetuates a racial theory more characteristic of our enemies than of an American university…”[6] Another editorial proclaimed,“the time is here when Princetonians must face courageously the shameful conflict between their principles and their practice.”[7]

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The editorials were met with mostly negative reactions from students and alumni. Princeton was in many ways a southern school, some said, and should remain so.[8] Others argued that the southern prejudice was a real issue on campus.[9] In the midst of this debate, the Prince printed a letter from a young Black man, Andrew Hatcher:

I was born and bred in Princeton. The events of your university during the past decade are among the most intimate of my childhood memories. … As vehemently as I condemn your prejudices, I deplore your hesitancy, first to proclaim the ideals of democracy and, secondly, to support Christianity as it applies to interracial cooperation.[10]

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Broderick didn’t leave his push to integrate Princeton behind when he graduated. In 1946, the Princeton Summer Camp reopened under his leadership after closing in 1941 on account of World War II. The camp, today known as Princeton-Blairstown Center, had originally been for whites only. With Broderick as its new director, however, it accepted African American campers from the Witherspoon YMCA of Princeton alongside its usual contingent of underprivileged white boys from Philadelphia and New York. Bringing in these Black campers would be, Broderick had suggested to his University advisers, “a social experiment.”[11]

Robert Joseph Rivers was one of the first eight Black campers. Rivers later wrote that the experiment worked, for him and for others as well. That summer, 14-year-old Rivers had hope that a different future was possible. It was, he said, “a defining moment. … I began to think seriously about personal possibilities at Princeton University.”[12]

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Opening the Gates

More change was coming to the town of Princeton. The borough’s Board of Education had ended segregation in public schools beginning with the 1948-1949 academic year.[13] Meanwhile, Rivers watched as three more African American undergraduates cracked open the gates to Princeton University. He chose to apply to Princeton, and only to Princeton, in order to become a part of the change he was witnessing.[14]

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In 1949, Rivers entered Princeton with two other Black students as part of the class of 1953, though only Rivers would receive his degree. (Grady Lee Smith tragically drowned after his first year of study, and Royce H. Vaughn left without completing a senior thesis.)[15] Though he had gained admission to the classroom, Rivers didn’t necessarily gain admission to campus social life. He avoided the eating clubs—bastions of tradition where he felt unwelcome. Regarding his time at Princeton, Rivers later told the New York Times that it had been difficult to be a Black student on an overwhelmingly white campus:

It wasn’t a question of a black identity in those days, you just didn’t have any. It was a very lonely feeling for most blacks. The cooks, janitors and the black people in town were your main support system.[16]

As Rivers said on another occasion: “I had to live in two worlds” at Princeton.[17]

Rivers aspired to a career in medicine. Volunteering at the Princeton Summer Camp as an undergraduate and for a few summers thereafter, he gained the nickname “Camp Doctor.”[18] A Princeton connection opened doors for Rivers when he was choosing a medical school. E. Lang Makrauer (‘1923) contacted him and offered to fly him to Boston for an interview with Harvard. After earning his M.D. from Harvard Medical School, Rivers completed his training in surgery at the University of Rochester, where he later served as associate dean of its medical school and a professor of clinical surgery.[19]

Rivers broke new ground at Princeton in 1969, when he became one of the first two Black men ever elected to the Board of Trustees. (The Board also selected 22-year-old Brent L. Henry (‘1969) to join their ranks.)[20] In 2006, Princeton awarded Rivers an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree in recognition of his work toward making the institution more diverse and inclusive.[21] That legacy continued into the next generation. Of the four children Rivers had with his wife Ruth, three attended Princeton: Michael Rivers (‘1981), Scott Rivers (’1983), and Bob Rivers (’1986).

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The experiences of Robert Rivers and his family serve as a reminder of just how much can change in a lifetime, and how a handful of people pressing Princeton to live up to its expressed ideals can shape the institution. They are also a reminder that the past is not so far away. As Rivers’s story demonstrates, the legacy of Princeton’s relationship to southern students and racial prejudice did not die out with the Civil War generation.

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