# The library, the plantation, and what Princeton forgot > A Princeton student finds out the library he studies in was paid for by the Liberian rubber plantation that broke his neighbors' backs. - Title: The library, the plantation, and what Princeton forgot - Summary: A Princeton student finds out the library he studies in was paid for by the Liberian rubber plantation that broke his neighbors' backs. Princeton's rise and… - Keywords: princeton, liberia, firestone, slavery legacy, higher education, library, plantation, forgot, Rolling Stone - Source: Rolling Stone — https://rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/princeton-slavery-ties-firestone-exploitation-liberia-1235623888 - Author: Christopher Quire - Published: 2026-09-12T12:00:00+00:00 - Read time: 4 min - Topics: princeton, liberia, firestone, slavery legacy, higher education ## Congratulations, and disbelief Fall 2023, a giant tiger head on the laptop screen. The acceptance mattered less as proof of his own high school work than as the first fruit of what his parents survived. ## What Liberia cost his family His family was torn apart by Liberia's wars in the 1990s. His father fled the Second Civil War and rebuilt in Pennsylvania. The son arrived planning to put the degree back into Liberia. ## A class, and a shock Sophomore year, a journalism elective on 19th century trafficked slaves freed in Key West and shipped to West Africa. Then the professor named their destination: Liberia. ## The griot walks the campus Dr. Artemus Gaye, a scholar from Monrovia, brought the descendants' story to class. Then he led the students on a tour of Princeton he had never taken, naming its ties to Liberia as he went. ## Witherspoon, still standing An 18 foot statue honors the president who grew the campus and signed the Declaration, and who held two people in slavery. Students protested in 2022. In 2024 the trustees let him keep the spot. > free to their own ruin ## Stone is a family name Undergrads call Firestone Library "Stone" and cram there during finals. Gaye's grandparents, aunts and uncles tapped rubber on the Firestone plantation in Harbel, still the world's largest. ## Ten dollars a month His cousin Nathan described the stench of burning rubber, the wage, the blackened shoulders and bent spines earned over years of hauling bars strung with buckets of latex. > these were the backs that paid for our late-night study sessions ## A sermon on removal On the steps of Nassau Presbyterian, Gaye read Rev. Robert Finley, a Princeton Theological Seminary board member, who called free Black Americans a threat to order and told them to go. > land of their fathers ## Who keeps the record A griot is the family's appointed storyteller, keeper of the oral record. Gaye narrowly missed conscription as a child soldier and was sent abroad to study, carrying the story with him. ## A haven that was a deportation The American Colonization Society founded Liberia in 1821 and 1822, selling it as a free home for the formerly enslaved. What it actually ran was removal, dressed in the language of progress. > the history of Liberia is one intertwined with the history of the plantation in all its forms and meanings ## Princeton men built the ACS Charles Mercer, class of 1797, recruited Elias Caldwell, 1796, and Finley, 1787, to found it. Smith Thompson, 1788, was put in charge by President Monroe of relocating illegally traded slaves. ## A pistol at Cape Mesurado Robert F. Stockton, from a prominent Princeton family, took the land for Liberia from the Dei people by holding a pistol to their chief's head. He later ran the New Jersey Colonization Society. ## The dough face in Nassau Hall John Maclean Jr. ran Princeton from 1854 to 1868 and the New Jersey Colonization Society alongside it. He was known for accommodating Southern students, even through the Civil War. > a Northern panderer to the South ## Six cents an acre In 1926 Firestone took a million acres of Liberian forest for six cents each plus one percent of exported rubber. That rubber made the company and helped supply the Allies in World War II. > to all intents and purposes, [Liberia] was a colony of the United States ## Eighteen cents a day Controlled burns cleared villages, and the displaced could join the tapping crews. Pay went to chiefs who often kept it. Men, women and children lived in single room huts with no amenities. ## The library rubber paid for In 1947 that fortune built Stone, with a bust of Harvey Firestone Sr. at its unveiling. His sons, classes of 1920 and 1931, kept the ties, and the collections made Princeton a research power. ## Still in business with Taylor Charles Taylor's 1990s uprising ran on child soldiers and drove the author's father and Gaye out of Liberia. He is serving 50 years for war crimes. Firestone kept working with him anyway. > Their hands, it seems, were unfortunately tied tight. ## Documented and still unknown Much of this sits on Princeton's own site if you search hard enough, and Gaye wrote a book. The Black Justice League won renamings and new programs, but Liberia and Firestone went untouched. ## Nine percent to 5.4 After the 2023 ruling against race conscious admissions, Black admits at Princeton fell from nine percent to 5.4, the smallest Black freshman share since 1968, with federal pressure still rising. ## Disremembering, and its cure In an office behind four locked doors, Eddie Glaude Jr. named the problem with Morrison's word. The student is going back to Monrovia and Harbel to see what Princeton chose to forget. > If one cannot use the past, one cannot function in the present, and so one can never be free. ## Key takeaway Princeton's rise and Liberia's ruin are the same story, and remembering it is the first act of repair.