Earlier this fall, the B.J.L. plastered Princeton’s lampposts and building walls with posters of Wilson’s face accompanied by quotations of his that made plain his racism and pro-segregation views. (“The white men were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation . . . until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the south, to protect the southern country,” one read.) The sit-in was intended as the next step in the group’s campaign to ignite a conversation about Wilson’s legacy at Princeton.
.. She presented the students who remained with a choice that seemed like a kind of Catch-22: if they stayed any longer, they would face disciplinary action for trespassing; if they left, no one would be allowed back into the president’s office the following day.
.. Wilson, Painter said, was, in fact, exceptional for the influence of his racism–even for his era. “He segregated the federal work force,” Painter said, “and segregation meant expulsion, so he fired a bunch of people and made it extremely difficult for educated black people in Washington to get jobs.” Wilson’s racism extended to his scholarly work, including “A History of the American People,” published in 1902, in which he wrote glowingly of the cause of the Ku Klux Klan.
.. Wilson was not only an alumnus of Princeton; he was its president. Anthony Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton, told me that, by raising the level of instruction and the quality of the faculty, Wilson reawakened intellectually what had previously been known as the “drunken brother” of the Ivies. “Wilson really accelerated the process of turning Princeton from a small, fairly backward college in New Jersey into a serious university,” Grafton said.0
.. “There’s this perception that we protest because it’s fun and because we get some kind of sick kick out of protesting instead of preparing for interviews, doing our homework, participating in extracurricular activities, and graduating from this institution with a respectable G.P.A.,” he said.
.. Crocket argued that, at a place like Princeton, “where nuance and critical thinking is the norm, or at least should be, we can’t lionize any one particular figure without criticism.”
.. An hour later, as the group slowly began to disperse, Princeton’s Department of Public Safety sent out an e-mail warning all members of the Princeton community of a bomb threat made “in reference to a student protest on campus.” Owusu-Boahen said that the bomb threat changed how he thought about the sit-in.