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John Maclean Jr., Princeton’s tenth president (1854-1868), was a non-slaveholder and held moderate antislavery views. His commitment to attracting southern students to the college and reducing sectional tension on campus, however, contributed to Princeton’s conservatism in the years leading up to the Civil War.

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 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.