More than two years ago, Princeton Theological Seminarymade national headlines when school officials agreed to confront the school’s past and pay $27 million in slavery reparations via scholarships and other programs for the descendants of enslaved and oppressed people.
It was believed to be one of the biggest commitments to reparations ever made by a higher education institution.
But some students said it wasn’t enough.
Last week, seminary students held a protest outside the Samuel Miller Chapel, named after one of the school’s founding professors. They vowed to stop worshiping in the school’s spiritual center until the name of a man — who owned slaves and said in the 1800s that freed Black people should be sent back to Africa — was stripped off the building.
“Miller’s efforts against abolition and enforcing colonization of freed black slaves does not reflect the theological imagination and pioneering spirit of this institution,” the students, who also had a petition signed by more than 300 people, said in a statement.
On Wednesday, the school’s board of trustees voted to remove Miller’s name from the chapel. The school also agreed to student demands to move faster to create guidelines for naming and renaming buildings on the historic campus.
The decision is part of the seminary’s “ongoing work of confession and repentance” for its ties to slavery, said M. Craig Barnes, president of Princeton Theological Seminary.
“As a community, we are committed not only to keeping the legacy of our history before us, but also to continuing to make steps towards repair,” Barnes said.
The showdown over the name of the Princeton Theological’s chapel is the latest skirmish in the ongoing efforts by some higher education institutions to deal with past racism and make reparation payments. In many cases, schools have faced protests from students and alumni that they are not doing enough or moving fast enough.
Georgetown University, which once sold 272 enslaved people to pay off its debts, vowed in 2019 to spend $400,000 a year on community projects to help their descendants. But students protested last semester that the Catholic university has been slow to hand out the money.
Virginia legislators recently passed a law to force five colleges, including the University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary, to make reparations for slavery by funding scholarships and other programs.
Brown University, the University of Georgia, Harvard University and the University of Chicago are among a growing list of the schools that have faced criticism from students and alumni in recent months that they are not doing enough to make up for their ties to slavery and other racist policies.
Princeton Theological Seminary — which is located near Princeton University, but is not part of the Ivy League school — completed a two-year audit of its history with slavery in 2018. The school, founded in 1812 to train Presbyterian ministers, is one of the oldest higher education institutions in New Jersey and the second-oldest seminary in the country.
Though it has fewer than 400 students and about 40 full-time faculty members, Princeton Theological Seminary has one of the state’s wealthiest endowments with more than $1 billion in the bank in 2020.
The historical audit found Princeton Theological never owned slaves as an institution and slave labor was not used to build its campus. However, the seminary took money from donors who owned slaves, invested in banks that profited from slavery and was founded by professors and other leaders who supported slavery.
Some of the school’s founders were also involved in the American Colonization Society, which advocated sending freed slaves to Liberia in Africa.
Miller, the professor the chapel was named after, was one of the founding teachers at the seminary. Born in 1769, he was a scholar and leading figure in the Presbyterian Church.
The Princeton Seminary’s historical audit found Miller’s views on slavery were complex and evolved over time. His writings and sermons often spoke of the evils of slavery and the hope it would end. But Miller used slave labor while living in Princeton.
He also said newly-freed Black people could not be trusted to stay in the U.S. to live among white people.
“In other words, they must be severed from the white population, and sent to some distant part of the world, where they will be in no danger either of suffering themselves, or of inflicting on others, the evils already described,” Miller said in an 1823 speech in Newark.
The seminary’s board of trustees said their vote to remove Miller’s names from the chapel is part of the ongoing process of confronting the school’s past. The board thanked the student protesters for pushing for change.
“This decision to disassociate the name Samuel Miller from the chapel is another step in Princeton Theological Seminary’s earnest commitment to greater equity, including reformation and repair of yesterday’s wrongs,” the trustees said in a statement.
In 2019, the school promised to to use $27.6 million of its endowment to pay reparations for the school’s historic ties to slavery. But students said at the time that was not enough and the school should have promised $120 million more because the school’s research determined that about 15% of the seminary’s endowment was tied to profits made from investments and donors who profited from slavery.
The seminary stuck with the $27.6 million pledge, which it is using partly to fund 35 full scholarships plus stipends for “descendants of the enslaved and those from historically underrepresented groups” earning masters’ and doctoral degrees.
The seminary library has already been renamed for Presbyterian minister and abolitionist Theodore Sedgwick Wright, the first African American graduate of the school. The school also pledged to pay for additional programming at the Betsey Stockton Center for Black Church Studies, which recently hired a new full-time director, seminary officials said.
Princeton Theological students are taught about the historical audit and the school’s history with slavery in first-year master’s degree classes, the school said.
The school announced in 2019 it would hire a new professor focused on African-American life as part of its slavery reparations. That hire has not been made yet, but the school’s timeline calls for the new professor to start in the fall of 2024, a seminary spokeswoman said.
Students said they were pleased the seminary agreed to take Miller’s name off the chapel. But they said it probably would not have happened without the Association of Black Seminarians, or ABS, and other students pushing for the change.
“The Board of Trustees did not intend to take this initiative by the convictions of their heart, but as a result of the efforts led by the ABS in partnership with other student organizations,” the student organizers said in a statement.
The students also said they were also satisfied their protest prompted the board of trustees to create a new task force to come up with guidelines for naming and renaming buildings on campus.
“We hope that this decision serves as a catalyst for more action steps in the seminary’s journey of repentance and reconciliation,” the students’ statement said.
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