First African-American alumni remember journey to integration

When John Lee Howard ’47 received his diploma from the University, he also made history.

Howard, who majored in biology, was the first African-American student to receive an undergraduate degree from Princeton. When the University opened a V-12 training program for the U.S. Navy during World War II, Howard, along with three other black students, seized the opportunity.

“It was an honor. It was a privilege. It was a pleasure,” Howard said of his experience. “I felt like I got an excellent education.” Howard, a New York native, later attended Cornell Medical School and re-enlisted in the Navy for 26 years before retiring. Howard went on to become an orthopedic surgeon and currently lives in California.

Howard’s peers included James Everett Ward ’48 and Arthur Jewell Wilson ’48, both economics majors, and Melvin Murchison, who left the University in October 1945 before receiving a degree. Murchison ultimately earned degrees from Virginia Union University and Carnegie Mellon University.

Despite the prevalence of social and legal practices that discriminated against African Americans during that era, Ward and Howard said in interviews that at the University, racial prejudice did not significantly impact their experiences. Wilson died in December 2000.

Ward said he did not encounter any discrimination “of an overt nature that I knew of,” adding, “there were people there who probably ignored me and I ignored them, and it wasn’t any big deal.”

Howard said that he “was welcomed and treated in a very normal manner” while at the University. “In fact, there was no sense of prejudice or looking down upon me. I was just accepted as another student,” he said.

Howard added that at the time, the Navy was “closed, a totally prejudiced setup in which the only thing you could aspire to was to become a steward,” and that the idea of enrolling in the V-12 program seemed “crazy.”

The question of social acceptance at a primarily white institution posed a formidable challenge for many black students before Howard, Ward and Wilson. Though in 1935 Bruce Wright became the first African American to be admitted to the University in the 20th century, he decided not to attend after an admissions official told him that were “no colored students” at Princeton and warned him “a member of your race might feel very much alone,” according to his obituary in The New York Times in 2005.

Breaking down barriers

In fact, Wright was not the first African American to seek a Princeton education. Three black men, including a former slave, studied at the University in the 18th century, though none earned degrees.

The first degrees that African Americans earned at the University were in graduate programs. Irwin William Langston Roundtree and George Shippen Stark received Masters of Arts degrees from the University in 1895 and 1906, respectively.

The admissions rate for African Americans remained low immediately after World War II, when the V-12 program ended. The Board of Trustees and the University administration later began a program to actively encourage African Americans to apply to the University.

The Princeton community also initiated efforts to help the few black students on campus feel welcome. African-American residents of the town created the Parent Sponsor Program, allowing black students to live in their homes rather than reside on campus. The University also started a three-week orientation period before the start of the school year to prepare African-American students for University life.

It was during Robert Goheen ’40’s presidency that some of the greatest progress was made in increasing the diversity of the student body and faculty at Princeton. By the end of his tenure as president, the University’s recruiting efforts were resulting in the admission of 70 to 90 African Americans per class.

“Born as it is of our so­ciety, the American university must not surren­der its role as foregazer and critic — as searching mind and probing conscience — of that society,” Goheen said in The Human Nature of a University in 1969.

In 1969 Goheen oversaw the Program in African American Studies, which has undergone significant expansion in the last 40 years. The establishment of the Third World Center in 1971 expanded resources for the promotion of diversity at the University. The center was renamed the Carl Fields Center in 2004 to commemorate the first African American appointed to the University administration.

Some scholars think that the increased cultural diversity on campus may not result solely from active minority recruitment programs.

Sociology professor Thomas Espenshade said in an e-mail that “Race-based affirmative action has clearly been instrumental in helping to achieve greater racial diversity among undergraduate student populations at Princeton and at other selective colleges and universities.”