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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.

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.

In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, several African American men attended Princeton as graduate students. Princeton president Woodrow Wilson’s administration may have attempted to erase their presence from institutional memory, creating an inaccurate historical justification for excluding black students from the university.

James McCosh, Princeton’s eleventh president (1868-88), admitted African American graduate students into his classes and strongly criticized slavery and the Confederacy—convictions that angered white southern students attending the college after the Civil War.

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.