澎湃新闻记者 邢春燕 实习生 杨文佳
2015-11-24 14:45
美国的种族歧视之争在高校逐渐白热化。继弗格森、查尔斯顿等地 的种族隔离冲突被激化之后，普林斯顿大学校园也成为种族争端的是非之地，这一次讨论的焦点是美国前总统伍德罗·威尔逊，200名学生罢课静坐示威抗议他有 种族歧视的不光彩历史。11月19日，校方与示威学生达成协议，同意考虑将伍德罗·威尔逊的名字从学校建筑、机构和项目的名称中抹去。
要求抹去威尔逊的名字
成立一年的学生抗议示威团体“黑人正义同盟”在制作张贴的海报上引用威尔逊冒犯性的话，包括他对非裔美国人领导的评论：“隔离不是羞辱，而是一种好处，而且你应该承认”。
示 威者提出的清单中，首先要求学校“公开承认伍德罗·威尔逊是种族主义遗留分子”，并逐步重新命名公共政治学院和住宿学院。抗议者同时要求学校开设“边缘化 人群历史”方面的强制性课程，为教职工人员开展“文化资格训练”，并为那些对黑人文化感兴趣的教员设立研究室和会议室。
“要求清单”发出之后，大约15名学生通宵占领校长克里斯托弗·艾斯格鲁伯办公室。11月20日，校方在一份声明中说，艾斯格鲁伯及学校的两位官员在“黑人正义同盟”的见证下签署了协议，由此结束了这场长达32小时的静坐。
校方表示，有17位学生签署了这项协议。艾斯格鲁伯对学生愿意同校方共商解决方案表示赞赏，“我们欣赏学生愿意与我们共同努力找到一种对他们、学校和社会都有益的方式。我们能够保证通过合理的程序考虑解决他们所关心的事。”
普林斯顿大学的威尔逊学院
威尔逊学院要不要改名？
艾 斯格鲁伯承诺会促使从住宿学院的食堂中拿掉威尔逊的一幅巨大壁画，并引导校董会调查学校各团体成员对于“威尔逊学院”的命名意见，通过投票决定学院名称。 “在某种程度上，这就是符号在美国政治文化中扮演的角色。”艾斯格鲁伯说，“人们变得对符号非常感兴趣，真诚的公共对话的好处之一，就是可以帮助人们解决 社会中超出符号之外的问题。”
协议称，艾斯格鲁伯将给董事会领导发邮件，开始有关 威尔逊遗产的对话，同时表明董事会将收集“校园社区意见”。普林斯顿大学的官方人员也同时指定四间办公室用作“文化事务中心”，同时增强相关人员的文化资 格训练。此外，普林斯顿校方发表声明，取消以人名命名的6个住宿学院，这些人将只被称为“学校的领导”。
然 而，学生在建筑物重新命名的问题上出现了意见分化，不少人赞同“黑人正义同盟”的要求，但是觉得抹去威尔逊的名字太过分了。反对“黑人正义同盟”的校方团 体则在网站上称，这些要求对那些未来“寻求净化不符合现代标准的历史人物”的学生来说是“危险的先兆”，抹去了威尔逊作出的积极贡献。
“黑人正义同盟”成员、大二学生Wilglory Tanjong否认了这一观点，“我们不是想抹去伍德罗·威尔逊的遗产，理解国家和学校的历史是非常重要的。但是我们认为，不把威尔逊偶像化和神圣化也完全可以理解历史。”
美国高校近来掀起反对种族歧视的学生运动。11月9日，由于消极应对校园内发生的种族主义事件，密苏里大学校长蒂姆·沃尔夫在学生抗议声中宣布辞职。
威尔逊当校长时，普林斯顿没有录取过黑人学生
威 尔逊毕业于普林斯顿大学，1902年至1910年担任这所常青藤名校的校长，在任期间开始全方位扩大学校规模，提升教育质量，创造学术专业并引进小班制课 堂。为了纪念他，普林斯顿大学建立了伍德罗·威尔逊公共与国际事务学院。1911年至1913年，威尔逊担任新泽西州的政府职员，1913年至1921年 担任美国总统。他是美国历史上进步主义运动的领导人之一，但同样支持种族隔离。
威尔逊在一战期间领导美国并开启了国际联盟，并把黑人的收入压低到美国重建以来的最低水平，除去联邦政府中的黑人官员，监督普通工人之间的种族隔离。
在美国南方长大的威尔逊写道，“一个伟大的三K党”站了起来，帮助白人摆脱黑人无知持续的选票所带来的沉重负担。
威尔逊担任校长期间，普林斯顿没有录取过黑人学生。“这个地方的好传统就是不录取黑人。”他写道。尽管哈佛和耶鲁早些年录取过黑人，直到1940年代普林斯顿才首次录取黑人学生。
直至今日，一些“黑人正义同盟”成员称，他们常常感觉被排除在学校之外，所以他们要不断呼吁黑人权利来获得自己在顶尖学府的存在感。他们称，学校只有2%的黑人教师，8%的黑人学生。
“黑人正义同盟”成员Obi-Onuoha称，看到威尔逊的名字和形象，他就会想到自己在学校是不受欢迎的，“就像梦魇一样。”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/opinion/what-woodrow-wilson-cost-my-grandfather.html
What Woodrow Wilson Cost My Grandfather
By GORDON J. DAVISNOV. 24, 2015
OVER the last week, a growing number of students at Princeton have demanded that the university confront the racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson, who served as its president before becoming New Jersey’s governor and the 28th president of the United States. Among other things, the students are demanding that Wilson’s name be removed from university facilities.
Wilson, a Virginia-born Democrat, is mostly remembered as a progressive, internationalist statesman, a benign and wise leader, a father of modern American political science and one of our nation’s great presidents.
But he was also an avowed racist. And unlike many of his predecessors and successors in the White House, he put that racism into action through public policy. Most notably, his administration oversaw the segregation of the federal government, destroying the careers of thousands of talented and accomplished black civil servants — including John Abraham Davis, my paternal grandfather.
An African-American born in 1862 to a prominent white Washington lawyer and his black “housekeeper,” my grandfather was a smart, ambitious and handsome young black man. He emulated his idol, Theodore Roosevelt, in style and dress. He walked away from whatever assistance his father might have offered to his unacknowledged black offspring and graduated at the top of his class from Washington’s M Street High School (later the renowned all-black Dunbar High School).
Even as the strictures of Jim Crow segregation began to harden in the South, Washington, and the federal Civil Service, offered African-Americans real opportunity for employment and advancement. Thousands passed the civil-service exam to gain coveted spots in government agencies and departments. In 1882, soon after graduating from high school, the young John Davis secured a job at the Government Printing Office.
Over a long career, he rose through the ranks from laborer to a position in midlevel management. He supervised an office in which many of his employees were white men. He had a farm in Virginia and a home in Washington. By 1908, he was earning the considerable salary — for an African-American — of $1,400 per year.
But only months after Woodrow Wilson was sworn in as president in 1913, my grandfather was demoted. He was shuttled from department to department in various menial jobs, and eventually became a messenger in the War Department, where he made only $720 a year.
By April 1914, the family farm was auctioned off. John Davis, a self-made black man of achievement and stature in his community at the turn of the 20th century, was, by the end of Wilson’s first term, a broken man. He died in 1928.
Many black men and women suffered similar fates under Wilson. As the historian Eric S. Yellin of the University of Richmond documents in his powerful book “Racism in the Nation’s Service,” my grandfather’s demotion was part of a systematic purge of the federal government; with Wilson’s approval, in a few short years virtually all blacks had been removed from management responsibilities, moved to menial jobs or simply dismissed.
My grandfather died before I was born, but I have learned much about his struggle — and that of other black civil servants in the federal government — from his personnel file. What is most striking is his sense of humiliation; after all, he had spent his career in a time and place where, whatever was happening in the South, African-Americans were able to get ahead. And then, suddenly, with Wilson’s election, that all changed.
Consider a letter he wrote on May 16, 1913, barely a month after his demotion. “The reputation which I have been able to acquire and maintain at considerable sacrifice,” he wrote, “is to me (foolish as it may appear to those in higher stations of life) a source of personal pride, a possession of which I am very jealous and which is possessed at a value in my estimation ranking above the loss of salary — though the last, to a man having a family of small children to rear, is serious enough.”
And the reply he received? His supervisor said, simply, that my grandfather was unable to “properly perform the duties required (he is too slow).” Yet there had never been any indication of this in his personnel file.
Wilson was not just a racist. He believed in white supremacy as government policy, so much so that he reversed decades of racial progress. But we would be wrong to see this as a mere policy change; in doing so, he ruined the lives of countless talented African-Americans and their families.
It is this legacy of humiliation that the Princeton students demand the university, and the country, confront.
We must listen to them.
Gordon J. Davis is a partner at the law firm Venable.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/25/opinion/the-case-against-woodrow-wilson-at-princeton.html
The Case Against Woodrow Wilson at Princeton
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD NOV. 24, 2015
Student protesters at Princeton performed a valuable public service last week when they demanded that the administration acknowledge the toxic legacy of Woodrow Wilson, who served as university president and New Jersey governor before being elected to the White House. He was an unapologetic racist whose administration rolled back the gains that African-Americans achieved just after the Civil War, purged black workers from influential jobs and transformed the government into an instrument of white supremacy.
The protesters’ top goal — convincing the university to rename the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the residential complex known as Wilson College — has drawn heavy fire from traditionalists. But the fact that racist policies enacted during Wilson’s presidency are still felt in the country today makes it imperative that the university’s board of trustees not be bound by the forces of the status quo.
Wilson, who took office in 1913, inherited a federal government that had been shaped during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when thousands of African-American men and women passed Civil Service examinations or received political appointments that landed them in well-paying, middle-class government jobs in which they sometimes supervised white workers. This was anathema to Wilson, who believed that black Americans were unworthy of full citizenship and admired the Ku Klux Klan for the role it had in terrorizing African-Americans to restrict their political power.
As the historian Eric Yellin shows in “Racism in the Nation’s Service,” Wilson stocked his government with segregationists who shared his point of view. The man he chose for the postal department, which had the most black employees nationally, had campaigned on the promise that the Democratic Party could be counted on to keep black people out of its own ranks and out of the government affairs of the Southern states. In this way, the administration set about segregating the work force, driving out highly placed black employees and shunting the rest into lower-paying jobs.
For John Abraham Davis, a black midlevel manager in the Government Printing Office with 30 years’ experience, the change came almost overnight. Just months after Wilson was sworn in, Davis was demoted to a succession of menial jobs and ended up as a messenger making half his original salary. As his grandson, Gordon Davis, wrote on the Op-Ed page on Tuesday: “By April 1914, the family farm was auctioned off. John Davis, a self-made black man of achievement and stature in his community at the turn of the 20th century, was, by the end of Wilson’s first term, a broken man. He died in 1928.”
The steady attrition of black white-collar workers like Davis from the federal work force went far deeper than the customary turnover when one party succeeds the other in government. It was a premeditated attempt to impoverish and disempower a small but growing class of black middle-class professionals. This subversion was not limited to Washington. In a few short years, Mr. Yellin writes, the Wilson administration had established federal discrimination as a national norm.
None of this mattered in 1948 when Princeton honored Wilson by giving his name to what is now called the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Black Americans were still viewed as nonpersons in the eyes of the state, and even the most strident bigots were held up to public adulation. This is certainly not the case today.
The overwhelming weight of the evidence argues for rescinding the honor that the university bestowed decades ago on an unrepentant racist.
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