In 1944, the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company approved a $1 million donation to finance Princeton’s new library — with one condition. The Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library had to serve the company’s desire of “maintaining its high position in the Rubber Industry.”
Princeton agreed that the “outstanding University Library” would “at all times” teach the public about “the many advantageous uses of rubber.” Princeton further promised to “increase the available supply of men scientifically trained in rubber” — in so many words, to prepare the student body for Firestone careers.
Princeton’s Library propagandizes the Firestone Company. It serves a corporation that has, for nearly a century, oppressed Black laborers in the West African nation of Liberia.
As a volunteer researcher with the Princeton & Slavery Project, I have spent two and a half years tracing the entanglements that link Princeton to Firestone’s exploitation of Liberia. My research, published in full on the Project’s website, reveals how Firestone’s racist system of forced labor made Princeton one of the world’s foremost research universities.
In 1926, the U.S. State Department helped Harvey Firestone Sr. wrest a 99-year rubber concession from Liberia. Spread over one million acres, the plantation became — and still is — the world’s “largest single natural rubber operation.” In a nation founded upon Black freedom, our library’s namesake established an enclave of white supremacy.
Patterned after the antebellum U.S. South, Firestone’s plantation amounted to a network of forced labor camps. The project began with the forcible removal of Indigenous Bassa communities. White managers coerced tens of thousands of Liberian children, women, and men to tap rubber — grueling and dangerous work.
To combat the risks to the plantation’s productivity posed by infectious disease, the company turned to medical racism, in one instance injecting Black staff and residents with a live strain of malaria. The rules of segregation rooted in Jim Crow governed the plantation’s hospitals, schools, and social spaces.
Firestone claimed that its food subsidies, healthcare, and education system gave Liberian workers — who tapped rubber up to 11 hours a day, 26 days a month — all that they needed. In reality, the company exploited their labor and controlled their lives (and arguably still does).