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Although Princeton president Ashbel Green condemned slavery on moral grounds, his religious convictions did not keep him from owning or hiring enslaved people himself—including at least three who lived and worked in his house on campus.

African Americans were a constant presence at the College of New Jersey as servants, support staff, research and teaching assistants, and students. They labored under harsh conditions on a campus dominated by racism and white supremacy.

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.

Joseph Henry spent fourteen years at the College of New Jersey, serving as Chair of Natural History between 1832 and 1846. Sam Parker, his assistant, was a free Black man.

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.