A Statement from the Black Justice League in Response to the Removal of the Wilson Name
Renaming the WWS six years after the Black Justice League demanded it is a calculated PR tactic, not an adequate response to racial injustice at Princeton.
Chistopher Eisgruber and the Princeton University Board of Trustees,
We, alumni of Princeton University and the organizers of the Black Justice League (BJL), have carefully reviewed your recent call to action against racial injustices and your announcement to the University community regarding the removal of Woodrow Wilson’s name from Princeton’s School of Public Policy and International Affairs and residential college. With frankness and candor, Christopher Eisgruber et. al, we denounce your actions as woefully inadequate. Such symbolic gestures — absent a more substantive reckoning with lasting traditions perpetuating anti-blackness that our full list of demands addressed — reflect the University’s ongoing failure to confront deep-rooted issues that allow the racist status quo to remain intact under the guise of progress.
We demand sweeping accountability for the University’s past inaction toward Black students’ activism and we support current students who are working to realize racial justice on Princeton’s campus. Six years after founding BJL and five years after our historic sit-in, we recognize that there are some demands we no longer find conducive to the project of Black liberation — such as diversity training — but we still believe Princeton must offer more than it has offered.
President Eisgruber, the decision to remove Wilson’s name might lead some to believe that you, University administrators, and the University Board of Trustees have finally begun to confront Princeton’s disgraceful history of complicity in and indifference toward slavery, anti-Black racism, and discrimination that has occurred under your presidency and all nineteen preceding ones. We, however, are less than convinced that this cosmetic change, though long overdue, does much more than obfuscate centuries of inaction and apathy toward the anti-Black racism that remains pervasive at Princeton University. We pen this letter as a necessary corrective to the revisionism being promoted by the administration and in order to uplift continuing demands for racial justice at Princeton and beyond its gates.
In your statement, you mention that you lionized Woodrow Wilson in part due to “ignorance” regarding his beliefs. This is hard to believe given how strongly the University holds to every other aspect of Wilson’s legacy at Princeton, and how much BJL, students who came before us, as well as historians and alumni from all over the world worked to reveal the egregious viewpoints and actions of Wilson to roll back racial progress at Princeton and beyond. In 1904, years after most other Ivy League schools had admitted Black students, Wilson stated: “The whole temper and tradition of the place are such that no Negro has ever applied for admission and it seems extremely unlikely that the question will ever assume a practical form.” As another example of Woodrow Wilson’s hostility toward Black people, he also claimed: “It was a menace to society itself that the negroes should thus of a sudden be set free and left without tutelage or restraint,” clearly indicating that he not only disapproved of Black progress, but he also disapproved of Black people’s freedom beyond “restraint.”
Further, Eisgruber, your present day statements, especially the ahistorical public relations opinion piece you penned, are in direct opposition to beliefs you espoused and actions you exhibited only a few years prior. On December 2, 2014, only eight days after the acquittal of Darren Wilson, the officer who took Michael Brown’s life, rather than standing in solidarity with aggrieved Black students, you and Cecilia Rouse, current Dean of the School of Public Policy and International Affairs, sat on a panel entitled, “What Kind of Diversity: Is Princeton Too Narrowly Focused on Race and Ethnicity Rather Than Economic Diversity?” and engaged with racist lecturer Russell Niele, who audaciously advocated against racial diversity, stating: “The racial diversity we have in this country is bad diversity.” It was both baffling that the academic environment on campus was one that determined it was appropriate to debate the very presence of Black students on campus while simultaneously preventing those same students from sitting on the panel, all against the backdrop of growing racial tensions. After our group met with you in person about racial animus on campus after your participation in this panel, you urged us to “prove” to you the ways in which Princeton continues to facilitate a hostile experience for Black students, until you finally charged the Council of the Princeton University Community to “develop recommendations” and thus began the first of many fruitless conversations and hollow gestures that have not meaningfully addressed the lived experience of Black people on Princeton’s campus.
Months later in 2015, you strongly defended Wilson and the idolatry of his legacy at Princeton. In communication with the BJL, you wrote: “[I] agree that [Woodrow] Wilson was racist.” However, you further qualified your statement by quoting A. Scott Berg, a Wilson biographer in saying: “[at] the beginning of the 20th century…Wilson’s racial views were fairly centrist in America.” This stands in stark contrast to the June 27, 2020 announcement which states: “Wilson’s racism was significant and consequential even by the standards of his own time…Wilson’s segregationist policies make him an especially inappropriate namesake for a public policy school.” It is hard to believe that you so specifically quoted from Wilson’s biographical texts, yet continued to be ignorant to the extent of his racist and vitriolic behavior until recently, a moment in which anti-Black racism has come into stark relief. It is also difficult to believe given the threat of expulsion levied against us in 2015, the Black students who presented you with the opportunity for courageous action that you swiftly declined. The incongruent nature of your previous positions on Wilson with your most recent announcement indicates that your current posture is a superficial public relations stunt intended to obscure Princeton’s longer history of discrimination amidst mounting global pressures to address racial injustices and the demands made by us and current students for substantive changes that impact the lives of Princeton University students.
The nature of Princeton’s response is illustrative of a tried and true strategy of using symbolic gestures to palliate student demands. BJL’s own experience and those of the activists before and after us function as historical and contemporaneous confirmation of the University’s use of the same cyclical tactics to maintain the illusion of progress while simultaneously forcing students into a war of attrition. In this present moment, as forces resistant to change seek to undermine calls for radical transformation, it is incumbent on us to historicize and contextualize such practices for future student organizers and to name them for what they are: white supremacist.
The history of Black students at Princeton has been rooted in a tradition of various forms of protest, which is not hard to believe considering Princeton became the last Ivy League institution to graduate Black students in 1947, seventy-seven years after its peer institutions, including Harvard and Yale. We lift up the names of John Leroy Howard, Arthur Jewell Wilson Jr., and James Everett Ward, the first Black students to graduate from Princeton in 1947, whose admittance was not a result of Princeton’s commitment to accepting Black students nor a deliberate change to admissions policies (which would not happen in earnest until 1963), but instead, a happenstance of a federal naval training program instituted at the University for the purpose of relieving a then $850,000 deficit that threatened to close the University’s doors. Black women such as Linda Blackburn, Terrell Nash, and Carla Wilson would not enter Princeton until 1969 with the start of coeducation, and we celebrate their persistence in the face of severe discrimination. Princeton has historically proven to be an institution of little courage and foresight. And the belated removal of Wilson’s name is a contemporaneous example of the convenience required for the institution to change and challenge itself.
Equally as unsurprising is the consistent and systematic disenfranchisement of Black students at the hands of racists that also occupied important offices like the Princeton Office of Admissions. In 1935, after arriving on campus, a student named Bruce Wright had his scholarship revoked when administrators realized that he was Black, to prevent his presence from upsetting white southern students on campus. Four years later, in 1939, then Dean of Admissions Radcliffe Heermance, a Princeton alumnus who graduated in 1909 under Wilson’s Princeton presidency, justified his actions in saying: “Princeton University does not discriminate against any race, color, or creed…[we] would enforce my advice to any colored student, that he would be happier in an environment of others of his race.” The demand to remove Wilson’s name was not just about his racist beliefs as an individual, but also about the insidiously racist legacy he cultivated at the University. Our demand to remove Wilson’s name was among a list of other structural changes to begin to excavate that legacy from the University’s core.
In response to this and other acts of injustice, since at least the late 1960s, Black students have adopted a range of tactics to express their dissatisfaction with Princeton’s apathy and antagonism towards racial justice including: picketing, protesting, sitting in at University buildings, and, of course, frequent meetings and conversations with administrators, often to their own physical, emotional, and academic detriment, with the University at times threatening expulsion or the use of University police to quell peaceful protests. Further, while specific student demands have also varied over time — including economic divestiture from apartheid South Africa; the creation of Black housing and social affinity spaces; legitimized and transparent structures within the University administration to investigate racial animus; increasing the number of Black students and faculty; and reexamining the relationship between the University and local police departments due to their racist policing of students of color — the University’s calculated and inadequate responses have remained the same: charge a committee, convene a task force, draft solutions, adopt very little, rinse and repeat.
Committees have been touted as the necessary vehicle for any change on campus, but we and student organizers before us know these committees exist to delay change, impede intentionally disruptive demonstrations on campus, and absolve the University from engaging in a real reckoning with the racism it perpetuates. The hollowness of such committees is no clearer than in this present moment: the University, via its President and the Board of Trustees, unilaterally made the decision to remove Wilson’s name from the public policy school and residential college. This change did not require the use of a committee or years-long discussions, especially when student activists had been calling for the change. Moreover, the energy exerted to consider making this change would have been better spent on substantive changes to the campus climate. Instead, committees have been weaponized as a tactic to exhaust student organizers and undermine progress until the subsequent cycle of student activism.
Further, at every moment in which the University has responded to student demands, they have actively erased the labor and contributions of the Black students who have organized for such change. Princeton University administrators and trustees have claimed their triumphs as their own, as they have in this moment.
Princeton University’s Board of Trustees, through their vote to honor one of the many demands we presented in 2014, by removing Wilson’s name from the School of Public Policy and International Affairs as well as the residential college, has admitted that they have learned something from Black folks’ advocacy — as institutions have for generations. Now they must go even further and admit that they have learned more and thus, must do more. As James Baldwin put it in his 1970 letter to Angela Davis about white people atoning for their own misdeeds, “They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children, or their fate” (Baldwin 1970). We have required President Eisgruber and Princeton University administrators and trustees to become responsible for themselves. We, alumni and current student organizers, are again requiring Princeton to do more than this mere cosmetic change.
We know that elite, predominantly and historically white and wealthy institutions cannot be reformed into institutions that hold radical Black liberation politics. Princeton was founded even before the United States’ independence, as enslaved African Americans were forced to lay the foundations — brick by brick — for what became the American empire, and as Indigenous people were violently forced off the lands they cared for and lived on. Thus, we answer Robin D.G. Kelley’s call to “think about what it means for black students to choose to follow Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s call to become subversives in the academy, exposing and resisting its labor exploitation, its gentrifying practices, its endowments built on misery, its class privilege often camouflaged in multicultural garb, and its commitments to war and security” (Kelley 2016). Princeton University cannot “love” Black students, to use Kelley’s term, but they owe them more than symbolic apologies in the form of corrective name changes. In fact, we, and those who came before us, demanded much more than a symbolic name change during our organizing and direct actions at Princeton and current students are demanding more now.
President Eisgruber, if you and the University Board of Trustees want to demonstrate your collective commitment to improving the material conditions of Black people on campus and beyond, acknowledge the work of past student organizers, including the Black Justice League, and heed the demands of current student organizers. We require more, current students require more, and the University must also require more of itself.
— Black Justice League
