Witherspoon Street School for Colored Children

The Witherspoon Street School for Colored Children opened as an incorporated Borough school serving Princeton’s Black students in 1858. As a continuation of Betsey’s Stockton’s common school,  this school was at first housed in the same schoolhouse between Maclean and Quarry Streets. A new wooden schoolhouse was built in 1873 at the corner of Maclean and Witherspoon Streets.

As the Borough’s only school for Black students, the Witherspoon Street School educated children from kindergarten to eighth grade, split into “Primary,” “Intermediate,” and “Grammar/Higher” departments. The Witherspoon Street School was considered a “separate department” of the Princeton Model School, but Princeton High School remained segregated. If Witherspoon graduates wished to continue their education further, they had to attend high school in another community. By the 1880s, the student body had reached 200 students, who showed off their academic and artistic achievements in yearly closing exercises.

Following the 1896 Plessy v. Feguson ruling by the United States Supreme Court, which permitted racial segregation so long as the separate facilities were “equal,” the Witherspoon Street School underwent a major remodeling. Architects Slack & Hill doubled the size of the school, making it two stories and adding a larger porch. In 1908, the school moved to a new building on Quarry Street.