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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.

The development of New Jersey’s legal code relating to slavery was marked by internal divisions. Ultimately, slavery was not fully abolished in the state until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.

Princeton’s faculty and students actively opposed abolition, creating a climate of fear and intimidation around the subject during the 19th century. Although some Princeton affiliates were critical of slavery, the institution demonstrated a catastrophic failure of leadership on the greatest moral question of the age.

Princeton affiliates helped to establish Liberia as an African colony for Black American emigrants. Robert Wood Sawyer (Class of 1838) served as a missionary among the Kru people, in the territory south of the colony.

In 1948, after a century of segregation, the town of Princeton integrated the white Nassau Street School and the Black Witherspoon Street School with a system called the “Princeton Plan.” Contemporary reactions to desegregation revealed Princeton’s racial divisions as well as the Black community’s commitment to education.