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News about the College of New Jersey and its students—including their connections to the South—spread across the country through multiple forms of print media.

Local academies in Princeton helped maintain the relationship between the College of New Jersey and the South.

When three Princeton students organized a petition protesting the acquittal of Emmett Till’s murderers in 1955, classmates dressed in KKK robes threatened their lives. Though the campus newspaper and Princeton administration characterized the incident as a “prank,” the event revealed deep divisions on campus over issues of racial justice.

Runaway slaves from the Princeton area used sophisticated knowledge of the late-18th and early-19th century’s changing legal and political landscape when they planned their escapes, forcing slave-owners to acknowledge their resourcefulness and determination to liberate themselves.

During the early 1920s, Princeton students came into contact with local members of the Ku Klux Klan. Their interactions with the Klan reveal both curiosity about the organization and anxiety about the following it could develop on university campuses.