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Princeton announces 1st black valedictorian

 
DukeStreet 2020-05-11 15:22:36 

Nicholas Johnson is this year’s Princeton University valedictorian and he’s also making history at the same time.

He is officially the private Ivy League’s research university’s first African American to hold the position in their 274-year-old history, Princeton University announced on their website.


Princeton announces its 1st black valedictorian

He's actually Canadian and has Bahamian (mother) and Jamaican (father) roots.
Congrats, young man!

 
Runs 2020-05-11 15:31:06 

In reply to DukeStreet

Nice, congrats youth.

 
black 2020-05-11 15:32:34 

In reply to DukeStreet

Well done!

Congrats to the young man.

 
Kay 2020-05-11 15:48:36 

Presidential candidate ---- 2036!!

 
JohnBull 2020-05-11 16:42:55 

How the raass could Princeton not have had a black valedictorian until now, 2020....?

That's wtf I wanna know..!

 
BeatDball 2020-05-11 17:56:08 

Nice. Mih see the yardiness in him!
big grin wink

 
Casper 2020-05-11 18:14:28 

Congrats to Mr. Johnson.

No congrats for Princeton U. I hope that institution doesn't see this as reparations for its original sin



But slavery was woven into campus life nonetheless. According to essays on the project website, 16 of the University’s 23 founding trustees “bought, sold, traded, or inherited” slaves, and Princeton’s first nine presidents, who served between 1746 and 1854, all held slaves at some point in their lives — although, in a strange cognitive dissonance, several also preached that slavery was morally wrong.

In 1766, after the death of the University’s fifth president, the Rev. Samuel Finley, his executors advertised an auction of his property — including six slaves — to be held outside the President’s House, now known as Maclean House. Nearby stood the two sycamore trees Finley had planted earlier that year, in what campus legend inaccurately holds to be a commemoration of the repeal of the Stamp Act, a milestone on the road to American independence.

Princeton’s entanglement with slavery mirrors New Jersey’s status as a nominally anti-slavery Northern state with unusual sympathy for the South. New Jersey was the last Northern state to abolish slavery, voting in 1804 to outlaw the institution with a gradualism that favored the interests of slaveholders and left a handful of slaves as late as 1865. Abraham Lincoln lost the popular vote in New Jersey in both 1860 and 1864, and the state initially refused to ratify the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which banned slavery.

“This is a very peculiar experience in the North,” says Craig Hollander, an assistant professor of history at the College of New Jersey, who worked with the Princeton & Slavery Project as a postdoctoral fellow in 2013–15. “There were just a lot of economic and cultural ties to the South, and Princeton played an extremely important role in cultivating those ties.”