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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.

James Collins Johnson, a fugitive slave freed after an 1843 trial in Princeton, became a prominent figure in town and on campus over the course of his many decades working at the College of New Jersey.

Princeton students performed in blackface in the 19th and 20th centuries, until as late as 1949. The legacy of Princeton’s minstrel traditions continues to live on in American culture through the popular folk song “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”

Princeton’s faculty and students actively opposed abolition, creating a climate of fear and intimidation around the subject during the 19th century. Although some Princeton affiliates were critical of slavery, the institution demonstrated a catastrophic failure of leadership on the greatest moral question of the age.

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.