Princeton University has announced plans to remove the name of former president Woodrow Wilson from its public policy school because of his segregationist views. Here’s a look at the latest news from across the U.S. about the ongoing reckoning over race.
The latest:
- What protesters want: Black Lives Matters demonstrators on change
- Princeton to remove former U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s name from public policy school
- Thousands in Colorado call for justice in death of Elijah McClain, 23
- Mississippi takes step toward dropping Confederate image from flag
- Alabama officer fired after posting image of protester in crosshairs
- Players kneel for national anthem in NWSL’s return ‘to protest racial injustice’
- The Simpsons ditches using white voices for characters of colour
Princeton University has announced plans to remove the name of former president Woodrow Wilson from its public policy school because of his segregationist views, reversing a decision the Ivy League school in Princeton, N.J., made four years ago to keep the name.
University president Christopher Eisgruber said in a letter to the school community Saturday that the board of trustees had concluded that “Wilson’s racist views and policies make him an inappropriate namesake” for Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs and the residential college.
Eisgruber said the trustees decided in April 2016 on some changes to make the university “more inclusive and more honest about its history” but decided to retain Wilson’s name, but revisited the issue in light of the recent killings of George Floyd and others.
Floyd died May 25 after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed a knee into his neck for several minutes even as he pleaded for air and stopped moving.
Wilson, governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913 and then the 28th U.S. president from 1913 to 1921, supported segregation and imposed it on several federal agencies not racially divided up to that point. He also barred Black students from Princeton while serving as university president and spoke approvingly of the Ku Klux Klan.
Earlier in the week, Monmouth University of New Jersey removed Wilson’s name from one of its most prominent buildings, citing efforts to increase diversity and inclusiveness. The superintendent of the Camden school district also announced plans to rename Woodrow Wilson High School, one of the district’s two high schools.
“Wilson’s racism was significant and consequential even by the standards of his own time,” Eisgruber said.
The former president’s segregationist policies “make him an especially inappropriate namesake for a public policy school,” he said.
The trustees said they had taken what they called “this extraordinary step” because Wilson’s name was not appropriate “for a school whose scholars, students, and alumni must be firmly