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Of Princeton's more than 160 endowed professorships and lectureships, four honor men who derived their fortunes from slave labor or contributed to the legacy of slavery in New Jersey and the United States.

The financial contributions of Moses Taylor Pyne (class of 1877), one of Princeton's most prominent benefactors, reveal the complex relationship between Princeton, the American sugar trade, and the slave economy.

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.

In 1895, African American Princeton resident John Collins shot and killed white Princeton student Frederick Ohl. The racially biased news coverage surrounding Collins’s trial illustrates racial tensions still present on campus and in town thirty years after the end of 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.