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Forced labor in Liberia built the Firestone fortune—and transformed Princeton. The story of Firestone, Liberia, and Princeton reveals how racist exploitation entangled and enriched Nassau Hall in the century that followed the U.S. Civil War.

Prospect House and Palmer House, both now University properties, have deep links to the Potters—a slaveholding family with strong ties to Georgia as well as to Princeton and the College of New Jersey.

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).

William Taylor, a black entrepreneur in Princeton in the first half of the 20th century, was the third and last in a line of independent African American vendors who sold refreshments to students. The nickname students used for Taylor (a racial slur) reflected the casual racism in Princeton was still very much present during the postbellum era, as in the days of the first campus vendor, former fugitive slave James Collins Johnson.

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.