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PAWcast: Jon Ort ’21 on Firestone’s Forced Labor and Donations to Princeton
Princeton Alumni Weekly Podcasts
English - February 02, 2023 14:22 - 35 minutes - 48.8 MB - ★★★★★ - 9 ratingsEducation Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
While he was a history student at Princeton, and editor of The Daily Princetonian, Jonathan Ort, Class of 2021, began researching the Firestone company. Yes, that Firestone; the one that once dominated the rubber and tire industry and the one that donated the $1 million to build Princeton’s world-class library in 1944. What he found was recently published in the Princeton & Slavery Project, which investigates Princeton’s historical involvement with slavery. This time, the forced labor wasn’t in America but Liberia where Firestone used a racist system of forced labor to run its massive rubber plantation. Ort spoke with PAW about the connections he found between this system of modern day-slavery and the Firestone family’s many donations to Princeton over five decades.