The Harmonies of
Struggle
             and  Liberty

The African American Experience at PTS

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In 1825, at a time when slavery was a dominant and accepted part of Southern culture, Princeton Seminary admitted its first African American student: Theodore Sedgewick Wright. Only the second African American to have been accepted into an institution of higher learning (the first was believed to have been Alexander Lucius Twilight, who received his B.A. from Middlebury College in 1823), Wright graduated from Princeton in 1828. He went on to serve for seventeen years as pastor of the First Colored Presbyterian Church, the second-largest congregation in New York City. There he championed moral reform. Recognizing the need for both moral and spiritual guidance, he established the Phoenix Society and Phoenix High School for Colored Youth, through which he fought for the education of Blacks and urged his people to examine their attitudes and actions.

But this was not his total contribution to the church and the world. Wright became passionately involved in the antislavery movement.

"It is an easy thing to ask about the vileness of slavery in the South," he said in an address to the New York State Antislavery Society in 1837, "but to call the dark man a brother, to treat all men according to their moral worth…that is the test."

Working tirelessly (and to the detriment of his own health) for the freedom of slaves in the United States, he founded the American Antislavery Society (AAS) and was active in the New York State Antislavery Society. The price of his labor was a premature death, brought on by overwork, at the age of fifty. Yet one wonders if a man of such strong convictions could have lived any other way.

"Let every man take his stand," he wrote, "burn out this prejudice, live it down, talk it down, everywhere consider the colored man as a man, in the church, the stage, the steamboat, the public house, in all places, and the deathblow to slavery will be struck."

Wright’s contribution began a long tradition of social activism that established Princeton as the preeminent training ground for African American ministers in the remainder of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century.

Jonathan Gibbs, a graduate of the Class of 1834, became one of the first African Americans to serve in a high government position in the post-Civil War South. A resident of Florida, Gibbs was the state’s first African American secretary of state; in that position, he crusaded against the Ku Klux Klan. He also served as the state’s first African American superintendent of public education.

The Princeton tradition was continued by ministers like Francis James Grimke and William Alfred Byrd. Grimke, who graduated from the Seminary in 1878, was a noted pastor and social activist who supported the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Byrd, the only African American graduate in the Class of 1894, was also involved in the Black activism of the early twentieth century. After graduating from Princeton, he was invited to serve as the president of his alma mater, Biddle College, on the condition that he not champion civil rights. To which he replied, "If I was allowed to go to Princeton and be an honor student and graduate, why is it that I can’t go back to North Carolina, spread the message, and try to do the same thing at Biddle?"

It was while he was in Rochester, New York, that Byrd asked W. E. B. DuBois, the renowned African American author, activist, and educator, to attend a meeting of African American intellectuals at Niagara Falls, New York, in 1905. Out of that and similar meetings—later known as the Niagara Movement—the NAACP was founded in 1910.

It is because of this strong tradition of social activism, says Adrian Backus, a graduate of the Class of 1997 and the Seminary’s director of planning, research, and special projects, that Princeton differs from other schools of theology.

"A lot of writing and social action has originated from this seminary," he explains. "African American graduates of Princeton have worked to effect much social change in this nation."

Backus keeps a one-of-a-kind folder of Princeton-related newsletters, newsclips, and Seminary faculty and board of trustee meeting minutes that span four decades. The worn folder contains a plethora of details and records chronicling what Backus describes as evidence of how the Seminary has continued to evolve in its relationship with the African American community.

"That relationship has not always been great," he says. "There have been definite moments when the relationship has been strained…. But that is a part of a growing process."

Many of the items in Backus’s file bear out his comments. In 1963, the faculty requested the election of a Negro to membership on the board of trustees. President McCord commented on the "small number of Negro students in Presbyterian seminaries." A chain of events was begun.

By 1965, a special assistance program was created for African American doctoral candidates. In his faculty report of that year, McCord issued the following statement: "I should like to underscore a deeper commitment to human rights."

This commitment worked both inside and outside the Seminary. That year, the student council started sending funds to support construction to the many burned out and dynamited churches in Mississippi. In 1969, the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Lectureships in Black Theology were introduced. By February 1971, curriculum changes in the area of Black preaching were introduced, and a committee on Black Studies was created.

DuBois, in his book The Soul of Black Folks, describes the Black preacher as "the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil." He calls the Black preacher "a leader, a politician, an orator, a ‘boss,’ an ‘intriguer,’ and an idealist."Princeton’s first African American professor, Edler Garnet Hawkins, certainly conforms to that portrait (though it might be said that is where his conformity ends). Hawkins arrived at the Seminary in 1971, having been wooed for years by then-president McCord, to teach classes in practical theology and Black literature. (Hawkins loved, in particular, the works of Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and other significant voices of the Harlem Renaissance.) His presence on campus immediately changed both the atmosphere and the curriculum at Princeton because he came to the Seminary from the church in the world.

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