Shirley Satterfield stands next to the apple tree planted by her mother.

Envisioning a Future that Includes Stories of Princeton’s Past

By Ilene Dube | Portraits by Andrew Wilkinson

Shirley Satterfield has a dream: to establish a museum of African American history in Princeton.

If ever there was a person suited to the mission, it is Satterfield. She has been saving historic artifacts such as bricks, signs, stained glass, a barbershop bench, and doors from a house where Paul Robeson once lived. She salvaged pews from the Witherspoon Presbyterian Church — Robeson is reputed to have sat in them — and the Smithsonian Institution acquired one.

She even has her eyes on potential sites in Princeton’s historic Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood.

Founder of the Witherspoon-Jackson Historical and Cultural Society (WJHCS), Satterfield originated the first walking tours of the historic Black neighborhood in 1997. Serving as a trustee of the Historical Society of Princeton — she remembers being the only African American on the board at the time — she worked with then Executive Director Gail Stern to bring about exhibitions on Princeton’s Italian, Jewish, and African American communities. That led to her tours, which continue to this day as the Albert E. Hinds Memorial Walking Tours.

So that those tours will go on in perpetuity, her idea for 29 heritage tour plaques throughout Princeton’s 20th historic district was achieved through the WJHCS, commemorating such sites as the Witherspoon School for Colored Children, the Witherspoon YM/YW, and the Paul Robeson House, of which Satterfield is secretary of the board. If not for the plaques, designed by Studio Hillier, “20 years from now Princeton residents won’t know that we existed,” says Satterfield.

“The WJHCS trustees look forward to establishing a museum that will be a lasting tribute to those who have lived in and contributed faithfully to the town of Princeton,” Satterfield continues. “We are pleased to partner with the Arts Council of Princeton, the Princeton Public Library, the Robeson House of Princeton, Not in Our Town, the Historical Society of Princeton, and Morven Museum & Garden.”

Arts Council of Princeton Executive Director Adam Welch has just published The Witherspoon-Jackson Neighborhood: How One Community Changed Princeton (all sales benefit the Arts Council, Historical Society of Princeton, and Witherspoon-Jackson Historical and Cultural Society). In it Welch outlines how Blacks have called Princeton home since its settlement. “Historian of the local Black community Shirley Satterfield says the free Black community formed as early as the 1790s at the southern terminus of Witherspoon, spreading north as streets were built,” Welch writes.

Satterfield was also the force behind Albert E. Hinds Community Plaza, just outside the Princeton Public Library, honoring Princeton’s legendary African American resident who fought for social justice and civil rights and who died in 2006 at the age of 104. Hinds was the physical director of the Colored YMCA, as it was then called, teaching youth programs; in the early 1900s he helped pave Nassau Street, transforming it from a simple dirt road to a major thoroughfare. A graduate of Talladega College in Alabama, Hinds was the grandson of a former slave and the son of a waiter at one of the University’s eating clubs. In his life, Hinds did everything from delivering milk and newspapers, shining shoes, and running a taxi business. He took care of the furnace at Bainbridge House when it was the library, served on the Zoning Board and became a trustee of the Historical Society. Hinds was Satterfield’s partner in preserving a piece of Princeton’s history.

Asked, if alive today, Hinds might attend any of the recent rallies held in the plaza that bears his name, Satterfield didn’t hesitate: “Absolutely.”

This year, Satterfield received the Betsey Stockton Award, which is given annually by the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church to celebrate women who enrich the life of the church. Betsey Stockton was enslaved by the Stockton family, taught by Princeton University President Ashbel Green, and later served as a missionary to present-day Hawaii in 1822. Upon returning to the Northeast, Stockton founded a school for Black children in Philadelphia, taught in Canada, and upon returning to Princeton taught Sabbath School at Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church. She started the first School for Colored Children.

“Shirley’s vision for a museum dedicated to African American history in Princeton is not just a good idea — it is an absolutely necessary one,” says Princeton Councilman Leighton Newlin. “Princeton boasts a proud historical legacy, yet for too long, the contributions, struggles, and triumphs of Black Princetonians have been overlooked, marginalized, or erased altogether. A museum in the heart of the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood would not only preserve the memory of a remarkable community, it would also give future generations a fuller, truer understanding of what Princeton really is. It would honor the laborers, entrepreneurs, educators, soldiers, and freedom fighters whose lives were and are woven into the very foundation of this town.”

To fulfill the dream “it will take hearts committed to justice, just like Shirley’s — people willing to believe that saving this history is saving part of America’s and Princeton’s soul.”

“Ms. Satterfield has never allowed Princeton to forget the hands that built its churches, paved its streets, and shaped its soul,” said Dr. Jonathan Lee Walton, president of Princeton Theological Seminary, at a recent tribute to her. “She is a historian, public intellectual, town curator, and moral conscience. Yet it is in her storytelling that Shirley shines most brightly.”

The descendant of six generations of the Van Zandt-Moore/May family, Satterfield grew up in the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood and returned to raise her children there. Although an educator and guidance counselor by training, she likely knows more about Princeton’s African American history that anyone else. When she talks, dates and names pour forth. Ironically, she didn’t like studying history in school — “I never learned anything about Black history,” she says.

Today, Satterfield has so many stories to tell, beginning with the segregated school she attended through second grade. At one time known as the Witherspoon School for Colored Children, the building has been turned into residences. Known as The Waxwood, it is just across the street from the home where Satterfield now lives.

Filled with papers, photographs, and other archival materials that are essential to preserving a cornerstone of Princeton’s past, the house was once owned by her uncle, Bryan VanZandt Moore, an attorney who was the first African American on the Princeton Board of Education and the first African American Mercer County Prosecutor.

An apple tree in the backyard was planted by Satterfield’s mother, who inherited the house in 1979. That tree was in full bloom on the day of the interview — also the day of the photo shoot — as if the spirits of her ancestors were smiling down.

Seated at her backyard table, Satterfield pulls out vintage photos. One can see that Satterfield was always glamorous, always stylishly dressed with coordinating jewelry.

“I was brought up where I had to look nice, I was always in these pretty dresses, I always had to present a certain image to the public,” Satterfield says in an archived interview.

When she steps out her front door, she is joined by Newlin, Paul Robeson House President Benjamin Colbert, and architect J. Robert Hillier (publisher of Princeton Magazine), who also serves as treasurer of the board of the Witherspoon-Jackson Historical and Cultural Society. They are waved at and greeted by neighbors and passersby. People stop their cars and roll down windows to chat.

“All the dignitaries are here,” beams a cyclist.

Hillier first met Satterfield when he was converting The Waxwood into condominiums in 2004. The building had served as the Princeton Nursing Home in the intervening years since it was a school, though Hillier recalls that Satterfield still wanted to search for artifacts. Hillier named his new complex in honor of Howard B. Waxwood, principal of the school before the 1948 Princeton Plan that integrated Princeton’s schools. The Princeton Plan became a national model for schools following the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954.

Newlin got to know Satterfield when she asked him to join the effort to have the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood designated as Princeton’s 20th historic district. “From the very beginning, Shirley’s commitment was clear: she wasn’t just fighting for buildings or streetscapes — she was fighting for the soul of a people and a place. Week after week, along with a small group of determined citizens, Shirley led the charge to tell the story of a neighborhood built by descendants of enslaved people, a neighborhood whose labor and spirit helped to build both the town and the University.” They celebrated together when Princeton officially recognized the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood in April 2016.

Satterfield’s own story is a key part of Princeton’s 20th and 21st century history. Her grandmother taught Paul Robeson before he went on to become an athlete, actor, singer, and activist. Robeson’s father, the Rev. William Drew Robeson, baptized Satterfield’s grandmother at the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church. Satterfield remembers Robeson coming back to visit her grandmother after his family was forced to move away from Princeton (his father was dismissed from the church for his activism on behalf of migrant workers, Blacks, workers, and against Jim Crow Princeton). She also remembers when he came to perform at McCarter Theatre.

After completing second grade at the Witherspoon School for Colored Children in 1948, Satterfield started third grade at the Nassau School, now the site of the Lewis Center for the Arts Program in Visual Arts at 185 Nassau Street. Once there, she found that the white teachers did not expect the same level of academic success from the African American students as the white students.

She recalls an incident from a home economics class where she’d been laughing and someone said, “look at Shirley blush” and the teacher responded by saying “Shirley can’t blush, Negroes don’t blush.” It was one of many incidents, and the first time in her life that she felt she was different. In fact, it was integration that made her understand what segregation was. “We were disciplined differently, and felt we didn’t have the same level of caring as we’d had” from our Black teachers, she said in a 1998 documentary The Princeton Plan: 50 Years Later.

“But we still had our culture when we came home from school,” she says, sitting in her garden, where arbors bear the names of relatives who created pathways.

During the segregated years in Princeton, African Americans were not welcomed to shop in stores on Nassau Street. “We had our own beauty parlors, barbershops, ice cream parlors, and candy stores on Leigh Avenue,” she recollects. “Ice cream was a real treat because we didn’t have a refrigerator at home to keep it from melting.”

Shirley’s mother, Alice May Satterfield, worked at the Institute for Advanced Study. She often took Shirley, who was about 6, with her to work. It was at this time that Albert Einstein was at the Institute, and he would take Shirley for walks. She remembers how he looked, she remembers holding his hand, but she doesn’t remember what he said. She didn’t know he was famous, she just knew he was a nice man who took her for walks.

Alice May Satterfield’s other jobs included working in a gift shop at the Princeton Shopping Center and as a server at the Institute for Advanced Study and the Princeton University eating clubs. She worked as a janitor at Princeton High School, working her way up to switchboard operator and ultimately an administrator of substitute teachers. Through these jobs she was able to put Satterfield through college.

Shirley’s father, Claude Wayne Satterfied, a photographer, came from Philadelphia to Princeton to work at the Tenacre Foundation. With Alice, he moved back to Philadelphia where Shirley was born.

Alice longed to return to her hometown, so she left Philadelphia for her home on “old” Clay Street. Her aunt, uncle, cousins, grandmother, and mother all lived together. “All the families knew one another and took care of each other. Almost every home in the Witherspoon-Jackson community had porches,” Satterfield says. “When our mothers and grandmothers came home from working hard as domestics, they would sit on the porch and have a cold drink and conversation with the neighbors, telling stories about their day while the children played in the street. It was a community of faith and hope.”

Later, when the former Witherspoon School for Colored Children became an integrated junior high school, Satterfield once again sat in its classrooms. “But parents of the white children didn’t want them coming to this neighborhood and sent them to Miss Fine’s School and Princeton Country Day.”

In eighth grade, Satterfield remembers, counselors were preparing students for high school. She was in her gym uniform when she was called to the principal’s office. Terrified that she had done something that got her in to trouble, she found her mother there “to demand that I be changed from general to academic to prepare for college.”

And yet Satterfield says she was never given the chance to meet with a guidance counselor or even know about SATs. Her mother sent her to what was then Rider College in Trenton for secretarial skills, but it soon became apparent that wasn’t a good fit and enrolled her instead at Bennett College in Greensboro, S.C. “It was (known in the Black community) as the Vassar of the South,” she says. “We had to wear gloves and a hat and stockings and we had to carry a pocketbook. You could always tell a Bennett woman.”

Bennett students took part in the ultimately successful campaign in Greensboro to integrate lunch counters at five-and-dime stores. “We were spat on and called the N word and heckled, but we were trained to fight segregation through non-violence,” she says of her experience at the Greensboro Four sit-in.

After graduating from Bennett, Satterfield was recruited to teach in Las Vegas, where she met her husband. The newlyweds moved to Syracuse, where he was getting a doctorate in polymer chemistry. Daughters Tracy and Dawn were born in Syracuse, and while Satterfield was at work her daughters attended preschool at a JCC. “They came home singing ‘Hava Nagila’ and ‘Dreidel Dreidel Dreidel,’” Satterfield remembers.

From there the family moved back to New Jersey, first to Murray Hill and then East Windsor — Satterfield and her husband had gone their separate ways, and she took back her family name. While teaching seventh and eighth grade English at Kreps School and seventh and eighth grade English and history at Grace Norton Rogers School, Satterfield earned a master’s degree from Trenton State College (now The College of New Jersey) and worked as a guidance counselor at Hightstown High School for 14 years.

Although Satterfield never had the benefit of seeing a guidance counselor when she was a student, she gave her all in advocating for her students. When a valedictorian was not accepted to Harvard, she drove to Cambridge, Mass., to investigate why. “And it wasn’t even my student,” she adds.

She spent summer vacations going to colleges, advocating for students, making sure colleges knew about the quality of the students at Hightstown High School.

Eventually she was invited to be a guidance counselor at Princeton High School. In 1981, along with her two daughters, Satterfield returned to the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood.

“It used to be that I could talk to my neighbors over the fences as they were growing greens or hanging laundry — everyone knew everyone’s name — but now the complexion of the neighborhood has changed,” she says. “African Americans can’t afford to stay in their homes. I get calls every week asking if I want to sell my home.”

Tracy graduated from Swarthmore and works as college advisor at Friends Select School in Philadelphia. Tracy’s daughter — Satterfield’s granddaughter — Ayanna is a 2020 Princeton University graduate and is completing a doctorate in biophysics at the University of Chicago. Dawn went to The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA Law School, working for two law firms as equity partner before establishing her own firm with a partner. She, too, is returning to the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood.

Satterfield’s legacy is already entrenched. The Shirley Satterfield Scholarship Fund, in partnership with Princeton Children’s Fund, is given annually to provide financial assistance to Black middle school and high school students in the Princeton Public Schools district who face economic barriers preventing them from participating in various school activities.

Hillier is naming one of his current projects The Satterfield. The building on Witherspoon and Maclean streets was at one time the First Witherspoon School — Princeton’s first segregated school.

“If you are blessed enough to call Shirley Satterfield your friend, you know that her heart is vast, her spirit generous, and her thoughtfulness unmatched,” says Newlin, who calls her Sister Shu-Shu, “a name filled with affection and respect. It says everything about Shirley that, without fail, she will remember you — your milestones, your joys, your losses. Shirley gives from the heart in all things — whether she’s guiding a student, comforting a neighbor, preserving a piece of history, or simply reminding you that you matter. She carries the Witherspoon-Jackson community in her soul, and through her tireless work, she ensures that our stories, our families, and our contributions will never be forgotten.”

Councilman Leighton Newlin, Shirley Satterfield, and architect J. Robert Hillier.