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Princeton residents published at least 28 newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves between 1774 and 1818. Each tells a unique story of courage and resistance in the face of tremendous odds.

Betsey Stockton (1798?-1865), enslaved as a child in the household of Princeton president Ashbel Green, became a prominent and respected educator in Princeton, Philadelphia, and the Sandwich Islands (present-day Hawai'i).

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.

Runaway slaves from the Princeton area used sophisticated knowledge of the late-18th and early-19th century’s changing legal and political landscape when they planned their escapes, forcing slave-owners to acknowledge their resourcefulness and determination to liberate themselves.

Henry Kollock (1778-1819) was a Princeton professor, pastor, and slave owner. He appeared in the first fugitive slave narrative: Life of William Grimes, a Runaway Slave.