The prestigious Princeton Club, a home for alumni of the Ivy League school, has scrubbed the name of President Woodrow Wilson from its elite dining room.
The society has renamed the venue, part of their Manhattan clubhouse, “Nassau 1756” instead.
It follows a high-profile campaign on Princeton’s campus deriding Wilson as a white supremacist and demanding that the establishment’s School of Public and International Affairs be named after somebody else instead.
Club officials quietly replaced Woodrow’s name in the last few weeks on their website. A note made the change clear, but did not offer an explanation.
Nassau 1756, the innocuous new name, refers to the year the university moved to its present location.
Wilson, a member of the Democratic Party, was US President from 1913 to 1921. He was educated at Princeton and also served as president of the university for eight years.
However, his legacy on campus has soured of late. In February Heat Street reported on attempts by campus activists to pressure university leaders into removing Wilson’s presence from campus.
Previous attempts had failed, but the movement was reignited after Yale renamed its Calhoun College building in the wake of controversy about John C Calhoun’s slave-owning past.
Activists sent a letter to current Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber describing Wilson as one of the “White supremacists who paved the way for Trump”.
Wilson is widely celebrated for his leadership of the US during the First World War, his enthusiasm for international cooperation and his broadly progressive outlook – but his racism while in office was undeniable.
He re-segregated large parts of the federal government, expressed sympathy for the Ku Klux Klan and regularly worked to exclude or dissuade black people from public life.
As a Vox explainer notes, although the 1910s had very different racial norms to today, Wilson’s attitude was exceptional even then.
Campus protests have so far done little to sway Princeton’s leadership.
A statement in response to the February demands said “The question of Wilson’s legacy has been fully addressed by the trustees and will not be reopened.”
However, one of its most prominent alumni groups has taken a different view. Heat Street has contacted the Princeton Club for comment.