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(PHOTOGRAPHY.) Signed cabinet card photograph of the Rev. James M. Boddy, one of the first Black graduate students at Princeton. Albumen photograph, 5¾ x 4 inches, on photographer's card mount, signed and inscribed "Your humble servant, Rev. James M. Boddy A.M., 1897" with his longer autobiographical inscription on verso; minor wear and foxing. New York: Pach Bros., 1897
The first Black student to earn a degree at Princeton was a graduate student in 1891. James Marmaduke Boddy (1866-1935) was a Lincoln University graduate from Wrightsville, PA. He took graduate courses at Princeton University from 1892 to 1895, but received his graduate degree from the Princeton Theological Seminary (a separate institution) in 1895. See April Armstrong, "Techniques for Unmuting Archival Silence: Recovering More of Princeton University's 19th-Century Black Graduate Students," on the Princeton University Archives blog, 2 December 2020.
Boddy went on to a long career as a Presbyterian minister in Troy, NY and Minneapolis, wrote numerous articles for the Colored American Magazine, and was a correspondent of W.E.B. Du Bois. He is perhaps best remembered today for his October 1905 article "The Ethnology of the Japanese Race," in which he argued that the Japanese had distant Black African heritage. We have traced no other images of Rev. Boddy.
