Princeton Will Rename an Archway to Honor a Fugitive Slave

This fall, Princeton University students will walk through an archway that bears the name not of a rich donor or a dead founder, but of a fugitive slave who once worked on campus.

After his escape in Maryland in the early 19th century, James Collins (Jimmy) Johnson became a janitor and later sold snacks to students for decades before his death in 1902. Once a student reported him as a runaway slave, but a local woman paid for his freedom.

An arch in East Pyne Hall, a building with classrooms and offices, will show his name, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Thursday. Just beyond that arch stands a statue of a former college president and slave-owner, John Witherspoon. That juxtaposition, President Christopher L. Eisgruber of Princeton told the Inquirer, is a way of confronting students and visitors with “the complexities of this institution.”

Princeton is just one member in a club of colleges whose histories are entwined with slavery, the Confederacy, and white-supremacist ideology. Those entanglements crop up in many different ways. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, there’s Silent Sam, a towering monument of a Confederate soldier. Likenesses of Gen. Robert E. Lee were removed from prominent places at both the University of Texas at Austin and Duke University. And at the University of Georgia, remains that appear to be from enslaved people were unearthed during a construction project.

Reminders of an ugly past are rampant on college campuses. How to engage with those remnants is a constant question, especially for academics who work alongside them.

For Altha J. Cravey, an associate professor of geography at UNC, Princeton’s decision recalled a debate that consumed her campus in 2015. At the time, student activists were pushing to rename Saunders Hall because its namesake, William Saunders, had been a Ku Klux Klan leader. Instead, students wanted to commemorate the author Zora Neale Hurston by rechristening the building as Hurston Hall.

Eventually, UNC stripped the name. But it chose a middle-of-the-road replacement, “Carolina Hall.” It was a more complete message, and Hurston had spent little time in North Carolina, a trustee told The Chronicle. Some students and professors, like Cravey, still call the building Hurston Hall. By comparison, Princeton’s decision to honor Johnson is so exciting, Cravey said, because it’s “making that anti-blackness visible, but it’s also turning it on its head” by acknowledging black agency and “black brilliance.”

Inscribing Johnson’s name on campus is also a way to avoid “erasure,” said William Sturkey, an assistant professor of history at North Carolina. Often, colleges ignore the black people who have always been present on campus, whether as slaves, laborers, students, or scholars, he said.

‘A Band-Aid Someplace Else’

Even when a monument attempts to acknowledge the past, its message can go awry. At Chapel Hill near Silent Sam stands the Unsung Founders Memorial. Bronze figurines hold aloft a granite tabletop to honor the “People of Color Bound and Free” who helped build the institution, according to its inscription. But, Sturkey said, it’s ironic to watch white people eat their lunch on top of it, seemingly oblivious to the sculpture’s meaning.

When a university confronts its past, aiming for some form of “balance” is a fool’s errand, said Joseph Jordan, director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History at UNC. Jordan pointed to Duke University’s removal of its Lee statue. That monument exposed tension that couldn’t be healed by planting flower beds or obscuring it from sight, he said.

Reckoning With Slavery

In recent years, scholarship on the history of slavery has leapt beyond academe to force a societal reckoning. This occasional series explores fresh questions scholars are asking as America confronts its history of human bondage.

• A New Path to Atonement
• A ‘Long Overdue Conversation’: Do Universities That Benefited From Slavery Owe a Debt to Black Colleges?
• The Scholars Behind the Quest for Reparations
• An Antidote for American Amnesia
• How Should We Memorialize Slavery?

“You can’t heal a wound by putting a Band-Aid someplace else on the body,” Jordan said.

Universities can lend context to their monuments through classes, public lectures, and informational websites. But actually removing an object is the most difficult path, Jordan said. So when activists and scholars say to those people, “Actually, that monument celebrates a racist past,” it wrenches apart their understanding of a place they knew, Jordan said.

For Adam Rothman, just replacing a building name can be an empty gesture unless people are armed with information. At Georgetown, where Rothman is a history professor, a building name was changed in 2017 to honor Isaac Hawkins, one of the 272 slaves who were sold to benefit Georgetown.

Elevating Hawkins’s name made sense to Rothman because it highlighted Georgetown’s immense profit from the slave system, rather than burying it. But there is still no plaque near the building to let people know Hawkins’s broader history. That’s frustrating, Rothman said.

Rothman wants his campus to become a “living monument.” That would mean that any student, if approached, could speak to the university’s entanglements with slavery. They’d know it like they know the alma mater, Rothman said, or the school colors.

And at Georgetown, even the school colors need context. The two hues, blue and gray, were adopted to signify reconciliation between the North and the South after the Civil War, Rothman said.

The university “did this whole thing about slavery, and that’s been our focus,” he said. “But the Confederate symbolism in our school’s identity has been, like, completely ignored.”

Things move slowly, Rothman said. Reckoning with history is a work in progress. Officials at Princeton can hope that honoring Jimmy Johnson brings them one step further down that path.

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.