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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.

Robert Joseph Rivers (class of 1953) was one of Princeton’s first black undergraduate students and one of the first two black members of the Board of Trustees. While in town and on campus, Rivers witnessed firsthand Princeton’s legacy of privileging the comfort of white southern students over racial justice.

In 1922, Princeton affiliates founded a chapter of the Immigration Restriction League (IRL) on campus, advocating for restrictions on non-western European immigration into the United States. Though the organization dissolved in 1924, the IRL leaders’ commitment to white supremacy extended into their professional lives as influential 20th-century scholars.

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.