One man was carrying a 12-gauge pump shotgun and another was brandishing a. “At 12:45 a.m., Lapine and Murphy heard a knock on the door,” the Daily Princetonian reported on October 3, 1955, “and upon opening it, found themselves face to face with four figures clad in sheets and pillow-case hoods. The night of October 1st, William Zabel waited in his room to collect more signatures, accompanied by two of his classmates, Peter Murphy (‘1958) and Chuck Lapine (‘1958), who looked after the petition when Zabel fell asleep. The reaction to the petition, however, would prove that some students weren’t ready for change. Yet the 1955 petition was a break from this pattern, an indication that Princeton’s campus climate was changing. The school had only integrated its undergraduate student body in 1942, when four Black students arrived on campus as part of a Navy training program during World War II, and just four Black undergraduates had received their degrees by 1953. In 1935, a Black undergraduate named Bruce Wright had his acceptance offer revoked when University administrators realized he wasn’t white. In the 1920s, the Princeton Alumni Association donated $1,000 to support the Confederate Monument at Stone Mountain. This legacy continued into the 20th century. Of the approximately 600 Princeton students and alumni who fought in the Civil War, more than half of them fought for the Confederacy. Princeton had long been known as a politically conservative campus, particularly when it came to issues of race. More than 150 students and faculty members signed the 1955 petition. We vehemently reject a racial standard of justice and believe that a great number of our fellow Americans will support us. The petition read: The undersigned, students and faculty members of Princeton University, want to publicly reject the standards of justice and the attitude toward humanity implicit in the recent Emmett Till incident in Mississippi. Zabel (Class of 1958), gathered in Murray-Dodge Hall to organize a petition protesting the court’s acquittal of Bryant and Milam. Three days later, a group of 17 Princeton students and faculty members, organized by William D. Although there was clear evidence of the men’s guilt, an all-white jury in Leflore County, Mississippi, unanimously declared Till’s murderers not guilty on September 23, 1955. When questioned by the authorities, Bryant and Milam admitted to kidnapping Till but insisted that they had released him alive. Bryant claimed that Till had whistled at a white woman, his wife Carolyn, and in Bryant’s mind this justified violent retaliation. On August 28, 1955, Emmett Till, a Black 14-year-old from Chicago, was kidnapped, brutally murdered, and thrown into Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River by two white men, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.
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