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Alexander Dumas Watkins (1855-1903), a self-taught biologist, conducted significant scientific research alongside Princeton University professors from the 1880s until his death in 1903. Despite holding no formal academic position, Watkins worked in Princeton’s laboratories and taught courses as the University’s first black instructor—and the last until the 1950s.

Princeton student Thomas Ancrum attacked black abolitionist minister Theodore Wright during the commencement of 1836. The incident exposed the commitment to white supremacy among college students and officials.

On an 1855 trip to Princeton, Louisianan Ann Maria Davison visited fourteen homes in the town’s black neighborhood.  Davison’s observations convinced her that Princeton’s free black residents were intelligent and hard-working people fully capable of supporting themselves and their families—a position that contradicted common arguments in favor of slavery.

In September 1835, a crowd of students descended on Princeton’s African American neighborhood to apprehend an abolitionist. The assault underscored the presence on campus of a large number of students committed to slavery and white supremacy.

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.