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The financial contributions of Moses Taylor Pyne (Class of 1877), one of Princeton's most prominent benefactors, reveal the complex relationship between Princeton, the American sugar trade, and the slave economy.

James Collins Johnson, a fugitive slave freed after an 1843 trial in Princeton, became a prominent figure in town and on campus over the course of his many decades working at the College of New Jersey.

In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, several African American men attended Princeton as graduate students. Princeton president Woodrow Wilson’s administration may have attempted to erase their presence from institutional memory, creating an inaccurate historical justification for excluding black students from the university.

Reverend I. W. L. Roundtree, who attended the Princeton Theological Seminary in the 1890s and received a Master’s degree from the College of New Jersey in 1895, was one of Princeton’s earliest African American graduates. He may also have been the first and only former slave to graduate from the college.

In 1895, African American Princeton resident John Collins shot and killed white Princeton student Frederick Ohl. The racially biased news coverage surrounding Collins’s trial illustrates racial tensions still present on campus and in town thirty years after the end of the Civil War.