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The Witherspoon-Jackson community, centered around Witherspoon Street, comprised the heart of Princeton’s African-American community during  the 19th century.

Under the leadership of President Witherspoon, the College of New Jersey launched an ill-fated campaign to secure donations from slaveholding planter elites in the West Indies.

A firm majority of Princeton's founding trustees (sixteen out of twenty-three) bought, sold, traded, or inherited slaves during their lifetimes.

After a fire destroyed Nassau Hall in 1802, Princeton alumnus Joseph Clark canvassed Virginia on a nine-month fundraising mission. Throughout the trip, Clark relied on the hospitality and financial contributions of fellow Princeton alumni and their connections among Virginia’s slave-owning elite.

John Witherspoon (1723-1794), Princeton’s sixth president and founding father of the United States, had a complex relationship to slavery. Though he advocated revolutionary ideals of liberty and personally tutored several free Africans and African Americans in Princeton, he himself owned enslaved people and both lectured and voted against the abolition of slavery in New Jersey.