2

IN MY FATHER’S HOUSE

Princeton, New Jersey

I was staying on Independence Way, about seven kilometres from the town centre. A car setting off down US Route One would make New York City within the hour. Yet as soon as I walked along to the Ridge Road turn-off, the landscape became, quite suddenly, almost bucolic. Here, the houses were slender and white and elegant, tastefully screened from the traffic by a fringe of trees.

In 1952, Paul had visited Albert Einstein when the great scientist was living and working in Princeton. ‘You were born here, really. Imagine that!’ Einstein said. ‘I didn’t know anyone was ever born here. I thought that Princeton was only a place where people died.’

For his part, Paul didn’t object to Princeton’s staidness. He hated the town — or, at least, parts of it — for different reasons. It was, he claimed, a northern outpost of the white supremacist South: a place ‘spiritually located in Dixie’ where ‘Bourbon and Banker were one … and … the decaying smell of the plantation Big House was blended with the crisper smell of the Countinghouse’.

I walked down past the canal and across a bridge, where a sign explained how Washington’s men had forestalled Lord Cornwallis during the revolutionary war. Main Street ran parallel to the Millstone River, where the homes became grander still, and plastic-wrapped editions of The New York Times glittered with the dew from the lawns. Birds warbled in the cold; frozen puddles exploded underfoot with a sound like cracking glass.

These were the Bourbons and Bankers, I thought. Well, perhaps. Certainly, some of the more opulent houses looked like they might belong to financiers with patrician sensibilities. But if there were hints of Dixie in the white pillars and broad verandahs, in other respects the street was unexpectedly urban, especially as I came closer to central Princeton. For a modern university such as Princeton (‘Practically all there is in the town,’ said Paul, rather sniffily) brought with it a globalised college culture: the organic cafés, the bookshops, the boutique bars, the vaguely countercultural sensibility.

Witherspoon Street ran north-east from Nassau, at an intersection near some of Princeton’s grandest old buildings, with Nassau Hall, the historic university compound, looming over the corner like a sprawling medieval keep. I turned down Witherspoon and walked a little further, past an organic bakery and a cigar bar, and saw, with a strange burst of excitement, the green street sign advertising Paul Robeson Place.

This was where Paul was born.

‘I always tell people that if I ever write my memoirs, the first sentence would be, “I was born coloured.” Because when I was born, we were coloured. When I was at high school, we were negro. Through college, I was black, and today I’m African American. We are the only race that’s been changed so many times.’

The Princeton Historical Society had recommended Shirley Satterfield to me as an expert on the town’s African-American history. She lived in Quarry Street, in the Witherspoon-Jackson area, a cluster of streets once known as African Lane. A bust of Paul sat outside the exuberantly modern Arts Council of Princeton building, near the corner of Witherspoon and Paul Robeson Place.

Most of the houses, though, were significantly older. The Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church was a small wooden building opposite the Princeton Cemetery. A historical marker by its entrance commemorated Betsey Stockton, the slave who’d helped found the church in 1840.

‘My grandmother and all her siblings were born in Princeton,’ Shirley said. ‘They were baptised by the Reverend Robeson, and my grandma’s older sister played the organ in the church during William Robeson’s time.’

Paul was born in 1898, the youngest of five surviving children: William D. Robeson (Bill), nearly seventeen; John Bunyan Reeve (Reed), twelve; Benjamin Congleton, six; and Marian Marguerite, four.

In Princeton, as the nineteenth century came to an end, the opportunities for African Americans, who made up about twenty per cent of the population, remained cripplingly narrow. William’s flock took menial jobs, as labourers or domestic servants or cleaners or cooks, and they lived in the ghetto near the church in which they worshipped. As a minister, William was a pivotal figure, a leader in matters earthly and spiritual. He was not wealthy — theirs was always a poor congregation — but his profession allowed him a dignity denied to his neighbours.

Shirley brought out an old photograph belonging to her grandmother. ‘Somewhere in there is Paul Robeson.’

The image showed neat little children all sitting in a row. The young Paul stood out immediately in most of the photos from his childhood, simply because he was a head taller than everyone else. She turned it over. ‘See, here’s a list of all the pupils — and here’s Paul’s name and his address.’

When the adult Paul Robeson returned to Princeton to see his relatives, he would also visit Shirley’s family. ‘I remember him telling me stories, but I didn’t know who he was because I was too little. I just knew he was this wonderful man with this big deep voice. My mother said he was a great man, but he was just Paul to me. But he became very soured against Princeton because of how his father was treated and how people here were treated, for this was a segregated town.’

It was segregated when Paul went to school and it was still segregated during Shirley’s education in the 1940s. She grew up, she said, in a place where blacks and whites inhabited two different realms, much as Paul had described a generation earlier. ‘We had a coloured school, a coloured Y [YMCA], a coloured cemetery, and a coloured church. Every other store around here was either a candy store or an ice-cream parlour or a beauty parlour or a restaurant because we couldn’t go to stores on Nassau Street — we weren’t welcome there.’

So much had changed. When I explored the neighbourhood, I stopped at Labyrinth Books on Nassau Street, where the window displayed a selection of titles by Naomi Klein. Further down, a big organic grocery co-op sold carob and kale; at the Small World café, the bathroom graffiti advised, Riot, don’t diet. It was difficult to connect Shirley’s story to such places. Obviously I knew, on an intellectual level, about American history — and, of course, about Princeton’s specific past. But there was a difference between that abstraction and her description of everyday Jim Crow: say, the prohibition on a little girl entering a shop a few blocks downtown purely because of her skin colour.

Shirley had left Princeton after graduating from college to teach elementary school in Las Vegas, Syracuse, and elsewhere. But she returned with her daughters in 1981, working as a guidance counsellor at Princeton High School for many years. It was then that she became invested in local history. ‘I actually started with the history of my church. But then I realised that our community was prime property in Princeton and that we were likely to lose a lot of the historic community. I became a member of the Historical Society of Princeton in 1990, and they were just talking about white history in Princeton. Being on the board, I said, I’m going to start a tour in this community — because when they do historical tours of Princeton, they stop at the Witherspoon-Jackson area. Nobody was talking about this community! One of the things we want is to make the area recognised as historic so that the developers who are coming in don’t destroy it. Like the house where Paul was born.’

The old Robeson house was on the corner of Witherspoon Street and Green Street, just down from the church. When William had been residing in the parsonage, he’d been surrounded by relatives. His brother Benjamin and family lived almost next door; his other brother John lived in Green Street with his wife and children.

The building was now owned by the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church, and Shirley and I went into the church office — another original house on Witherspoon Street — to organise a visit. An elderly white woman was inside, typing beside a small radiator throwing out moderate warmth. She and Shirley discussed an upcoming church meeting while the woman rustled up the keys. ‘The door sticks,’ she said, as she handed them over. ‘Be careful with it.’

Once we got there, her warning made sense. The church had purchased the decrepit parsonage to prevent its destruction, intending eventually to create a Robeson museum. An architect had been commissioned to assess how the crumbling structure might be stabilised. But as yet no renovations had proceeded — and the old place was only barely standing.

In most Robeson biographies, William’s house is described as a relatively prestigious address, a home befitting a man honoured and esteemed by his community. But when Shirley managed to get the stiff lock open, the place just seemed small and rundown.

‘It’s not very big, is it?’

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘It’s not. And it would have been smaller than this, too. Later, they merged it with the house next to it. In William Robeson’s time, the parsonage was just the one building.’ Each house must have been tiny.

We walked into the lounge, the floor bending under our weight. I tried to picture the layout of the original building, attempting to mentally strip away the various additions. It was not easy. In their decay, the various elements of the house had come to seem as old as one another, crumbling together as one.

Shirley pointed to a pile of newspapers from 1934. The architect had found them under the peeling linoleum, where they’d been used to keep out the cold: a form of home-made insulation employed by the poor. ‘After William Robeson moved out,’ she said, ‘a woman whose name was Mrs Taylor lived here for many years, and she ran it as a rooming house for African Americans who couldn’t stay anywhere else.’

‘Why not?’ I asked, and then realised. ‘Oh ...’

She nodded. ‘Most of the hotels wouldn’t allow African Americans. So all around this area were boarding houses. Just so folks had somewhere to sleep.’

That was why the Robeson place looked as it did. We climbed an unsteady staircase and, upstairs, the rooms had been divided and divided again so as to offer as many little sleeping spaces as possible.

‘You can go up to the attic if you like.’

Sensibly, Shirley didn’t follow: the stairs here were even less safe. But the attic, too, had been transformed with cheap wood into monk-like cells, each barely long enough to lay down a bed. It was a legacy of segregation, a memory of racism embedded in the fabric of the house.

Later, walking around the block, she pointed to another old building. ‘See this house down here? I have a picture of Booker T. Washington sitting in front of this house. It was another boarding house, for people who couldn’t get accommodation anywhere else.’

Washington, the former slave who’d become the great apostle of gradualism and black self-improvement, had dined in the White House with President Roosevelt in 1901, an event of such symbolic power that North Carolina’s vicious Senator Tillman declared: ‘The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they learn their place again.’

Even a man sufficiently famous to sup with the President couldn’t take a room in Princeton.

We came back downstairs and through to the kitchen.

‘You can see what disrepair it’s in,’ she said, somewhat redundantly. ‘We do sometimes use it for meetings, but the last person to stay here was David.’

‘David?’

Then I grasped who she meant. I had attended a service at the Witherspoon Church, and the Reverend Burroughs, the current minister, told me the story while we chatted over coffee and cake after the Sunday worship. David Bryant was an African-American man. He had been arrested in 1975, when he was eighteen, charged with the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl. He spent thirty-eight years in prison before investigators re-examining the case found that semen discovered on the girl’s body didn’t match his blood type.

The charges against him were dismissed. But, by the time he was released, all of his family were dead. ‘I don’t have a mother or brother or sister,’ he’d told the press. ‘I don’t have any place to go. I don’t have a dime to my name. What am I going to do?’

The church had assisted him. That was why one little room in that dilapidated building contained a mattress and a few posters and some other signs of recent occupation. Where else could a newly released prisoner go as he awaited the outcome of his appeal?

‘There’s a tradition of this house being a place of refuge,’ Shirley said. ‘And we’re trying to continue it.’

Bryant had spent fourteen months out of jail, accustoming himself to an America changed almost beyond recognition — and then a higher court had upheld the prosecution’s appeal, sending him back to prison.

The Witherspoon-Jackson area might no longer be poor, and the Jim Crow laws might have been abolished, but in 1850, there were nearly 900,000 adult men enslaved in America — and in 2013, almost 1.7 million African-American men in the United States were either in jail or on parole. To put it another way, more black people were deprived of their liberty in the twenty-first century than at the height of slavery, a comparison absolutely astonishing and deeply depressing.

Shirley was still looking around the ruined walls. ‘We need more money. Now, have you seen enough here?’

I nodded.

‘Alright,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to where the Robesons had to move.’

‘Even while demonstrating that he is really an equal (and, strangely, the proof must be superior performance!), the Negro must never appear to be challenging white superiority. Climb up if you can — but don’t act “uppity”. Always show that you are grateful. (Even if what you have gained has been wrested from unwilling powers, be sure to be grateful lest “they” take it all away.) Above all, do nothing to give them cause to fear you, for then the oppressing hand, which might at times ease up a little, will surely become a fist to knock you down again!’

When, in his autobiography, Paul explained the lesson that, he said, every African-American child was forced to learn, he was probably thinking about 1901 — the year in which William was sacked and the life he’d built came tumbling down around him.

William’s position had always rested upon the benevolence of white Presbyterians, who exercised ultimate control over what they described as the ‘coloured church’. In effect, he was a go-between for the two communities — Paul called him a ‘bridge between the Have-Nots and the Haves’ — representing the interests of his African-American constituency to the churchmen of Nassau Street and embodying a Presbyterianism governed by whites to the black worshippers of the Witherspoon-Jackson area.

On 22 February 1898, a fortnight before Paul’s birth, a white mob in Lake City, South Carolina, set ablaze their post office and the house attached to it. Frazier Baker, the postmaster, died, shredded by bullets, and his baby, Julia, was killed in her mother’s arms. The Bakers were, of course, black.

Ben Tillman, the senator who later found Booker T. Washington’s White House visit so abhorrent, described the killings as understandable. No one could expect, he said, ‘the proud people’ of Lake City to ‘receive their mail from a nigger’.

Later that year, white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina, burned down an African-American newspaper and ran the democratically elected African-American leaders out of town. Scores of black Americans died in the violence, and the demography of Wilmington was fundamentally changed.

The Wilmington coup came at the end of a decade of atrocities, with lynchers killing an average of two people every week, a slow stream of murder eroding the social gains African Americans had made since the Civil War.

Most of the African Americans in Princeton had relatives in the South, and something needed to be done, they agreed, some opposition registered. The Reverend Robeson was one of the few in the community with authority and prestige. Naturally, when a meeting was called, it took place in his church. Naturally, he spoke from the platform, standing alongside those other representatives of black Princeton who could be induced to appear. Naturally, he was, in due course, selected as a delegate to a subsequent protest in Philadelphia.

Paul always maintained that his father’s insistence the government protect black citizens provoked his sacking by the white Presbyterians, a few years later. The churchmen wanted a minister who kept ‘coloured folk’ in line, not a man who attended indignation meetings and called for racial justice.

The Reverend Robeson’s dismissal was catastrophic for his family. William was fifty-six years old and suddenly unemployed. His wife, Maria, was ill. They had five children — and, all at once, no house and no income.

Shirley and I left the parsonage and walked around the corner to Green Street, a brief journey, even on the slippery, slush-covered sidewalks, but one that traversed the depths of the Robesons’ fall.

‘This is the house that they went to,’ she said, ‘after they were thrown out. The woman who lives there now teaches violin. If I’m doing a tour, she’ll usually come out and speak to them about Paul Robeson.’

This place, too, was white, but much, much smaller than the parsonage. Again, the building had been substantially renovated over the last century. Even from the outside, I could see that the verandah wasn’t original. In its current form, the house looked pleasant enough — not big, but compact, and comfortable for its size. But those were not words that anyone would have used in 1901. Back then, when William installed his family, Green Street was notoriously poor, even within an impoverished neighbourhood. The building at number thirteen was usually described as a ‘shack’; Paul later said it was ‘so bad it should have been condemned’.

But what else could they do? Where could they go? Without his church, William had no accommodation, no profession, and little chance of finding other employment. What vocation awaited a former pastor?

No longer a young man, he scrabbled for whatever work was available. Occasionally, he filled in for other ministers elsewhere, offering a sermon when they were ill or indisposed. But that was scarcely a regular income.

He bought a horse and wagon, and, whenever he could, hired himself out to white students seeking transport around the town. Most of the time, he worked as an ashman — that is, he went to the houses of Princeton’s wealthy, scooping up the debris from their fireplaces and adding the ashes to the huge pile accumulating in his own yard.

Paul remembered his father’s frock coat — the uniform of his respectability — becoming gradually stained with filth and charcoal. Yet he never heard his father complain. ‘Not one word of bitterness ever came from him. Serene, undaunted, he struggled to earn a livelihood and see to our education.’

Worse was to come.

‘It was in here that Paul’s mother died,’ Shirley said.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the Robesons were buffeted by a succession of misfortunes, each more grievous than the next. By 1904, the Reverend Robeson had scrimped to see Bill through Lincoln University and managed to enrol Reed, the next oldest, there. The other children were studying, too, with Paul taking lessons from Shirley’s grandmother. But funding the education of five children on an ashman’s pitiful stipend was never easy. In the past, William had been secure in the church and anchored to the parsonage. Now, he was travelling, accepting any work available, wherever it could be found.

On 19 January, he was away on business in the town of Trenton, New Jersey. The children were at school, apart from Ben — who, at age eleven, had been kept home to help Maria. They were tending the stove in the parlour together when a falling coal lodged in her dress. Her clothing caught flame, and she succumbed to her burns the next day.

Maria’s accident plunged the family deeper into crisis. With his wife’s death, William hadn’t simply lost his life partner and the mother of his children; he seemed also to have confirmed the worst expectations that others had harboured about him. For when he wed Maria, in 1876, he’d married — or, at least, so Maria’s relatives had felt — way out of his league. The Bustills could trace their ancestry back to the Revolution — an almost unparallelled feat for African Americans, whose family trees were usually truncated by enslavement. For generations, the Bustills had played a prominent role in black public life, fighting against slavery and agitating for civil rights. They were keen to maintain their hard-won respectability.

Maria had received as good an education as a black woman might obtain at the time. She was very light-skinned, sufficiently so as to pass for white, and her family expected a great match, preferably with a man from an equally respectable family. They did not anticipate she’d settle upon a dark-skinned former slave, a fellow still in the process of raising himself from rural obscurity.

The Bustills barely acknowledged the marriage. Later, they blamed William for Maria’s illnesses, particularly after Paul’s birth, and they were even more furious after William’s dismissal. By losing the trust of the white Presbyterians, he had, they thought, brought disgrace on the entire clan. Maria’s death in the broken-down slum in Green Street confirmed all their worst fears. Their no-good son-in-law had first shamed his wife, and then killed her through neglect.

William himself must, in his darkest hours, have wondered about the course he’d taken. His insistence that his children receive the best education available reflected the philosophy upon which his own life had been constructed. Yet, somehow, his progress had been reversed. Where once he’d risen, he was now falling, gradually coming unstitched, with everything that education had provided dropping away in stages: his profession, his home, his family.

Why, then, did study matter? Why master Ancient Hebrew and theology and complex mathematics if, in your late middle age, you found yourself suddenly living a life no better, and in many ways worse, than that of your illiterate neighbours?

William never posed those questions, as far as we know, but Paul’s brother Reed certainly did. Unexpectedly, Reed dropped out of Lincoln and returned home, enraging and disappointing his father. Yet in response Reed could point to William’s own situation and ask: why did college matter? The plain fact was, one of the most scholarly men in black Princeton hauled ashes for a living.

Soon Reed, too, was driving a carriage — earning just as much (or as little) as his highly educated father. Not only did he reject all the accommodations William had made, but he also urged his younger brother to do the same. Paul recalled Reed carrying a bag of rocks in the back of his cab as a weapon against the often rowdy (and invariably racist) students who hired him. ‘Stand up to them,’ he told his brother, ‘and hit back harder than they hit you.’

The philosophical clash between father and son soon came to a head. As Reed’s inflexibility brought him into more and more trouble with the authorities, William demanded the boy leave Princeton, worrying that Paul would follow Reed’s example.

But he needn’t have feared.

‘Paul loved his father,’ Shirley told me. ‘He adored him. William was old enough to be his grandfather, but that didn’t matter. Paul just loved him.’

Paul’s absolute faith in William was soon vindicated. In 1906, when Paul was eight and still at the Witherspoon School, the Reverend Robeson abandoned Presbyterianism for the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church: one of the oldest black denominations in the country. Shirley suggested that the conversion reflected his bitterness at how the white Presbyterians had treated him. But the affiliation also offered him a professional future, for under the auspices of the new denomination, he could take up a small pastorate in the town of Westfield.

In 1907, he relocated his family about 80 kilometres to begin building a congregation and a church in which to worship. Even at the Witherspoon Church, the Reverend Robeson had never been wealthy, but in Westfield, he — and hence his dependants — barely managed to survive.

‘I never remember us going hungry,’ Paul’s sister Marian later said. ‘Pop always had a garden and we ate good.’ But her response, in itself, spoke of the subsistence conditions in which they lived, without the close community support they’d relied on in Princeton. They might not have gone hungry, but they had few luxuries — a friend recalled Paul’s school lunch as two buttered slices of bread sprinkled with sugar — and little security while William struggled to reconstruct his life.

Yet within a year or so, the Reverend Robeson had, once again, established a church, a following, and a parsonage. To his son, it must have seemed a miracle: a kind of secular resurrection.

Shirley continued her tour, taking me past the house where John Robeson, William’s brother, had lived, just down the road from Paul’s place. The street was almost entirely empty — it was a cold morning, and the sidewalks were slick with ice — but you could imagine the narrow space crowded with noisy children and their games.

I said as much, and Shirley nodded. ‘When I was coming up, that was what it was like. Everyone knew everyone. Everyone was related. You couldn’t talk about anyone without thinking about who they were related to. It was a poor community, but it was tight like that, a friendly place.’

As a girl, this solidarity had insulated her from the worst of the town’s racism, so much so that it was the abolition of segregation that first made her feel the gulf between her community and her white neighbours. ‘Integration came in 1948. When we left the Witherspoon Street School for Colored Children, I left behind the friends who lived in the neighbourhood. The teachers were from our community. They were part of our families as much as they were part of our schools. When we went to the Nassau school, I was in second grade: that was when I realised I was different, because the teachers taught us differently. They basically told us that we couldn’t learn like the white kids. We got on fine with the kids themselves; it was the teachers who weren’t ready for integration. That’s when I realised that we were different — because the teachers treated us different.’

The Princeton cemetery was just across the road from the church. It, too, had been originally divided by race. By far the largest graves belonged to the white founders of the town. Interred in here were vice-president Aaron Burr, Jr; president Grover Cleveland; US Senator Richard Stockton; clergyman Henry Van Dyke; and a long list of other notables. But Shirley was a member of the cemetery committee (along with, it seemed, almost every other committee in Princeton), and she had insisted that the official tourist guide to the tombstones should include some African Americans. Accordingly, the cemetery brochure now listed the jazz musician Donald Lambert, the painter Rex Goreleigh, and a man called Jimmy Johnson, an escaped slave who’d become a well-known fixture of Princeton life in the nineteenth century.

We walked to the tombs of William and Maria Robeson, in a plot marked with a large granite slab. The stone had been erected by Paul’s sister, Marian, long after the deaths of her parents. Because of that, it looked somewhat incongruous, disconcertingly modern among the old graves nearby.

After his success in Westfield, William had been transferred to Somerville, a town with a bigger African-American congregation in the already existing St Thomas AME Zion Church. It was a promotion, to a post at least as prestigious as the one in Princeton. For the second time, William Robeson had created a rich life by sheer force of will.

Paul, too, began to display the range of his abilities. Bill had identified Paul’s musical talents during the family’s parlour entertainments, in the course of which he invariably sang.

During Paul’s concert years, critics searched for superlatives to describe his vocal timbre: ‘all honey and persuasion’, wrote one admirer in the late 1920s, ‘yearning and searching, and probing the heart of the listener in every tiniest phrase’. But that was much later. Bill’s early praise merely meant that Paul added the church choir to an ever-growing list of activities, with sport very much the priority.

The commencement ceremony after Paul’s first year in the local coloured school was held in William’s church: the local paper praised Paul’s speech there as a ‘rendition whose excellence has seldom been surpassed by a public school pupil’. He entered Somerville High School, becoming one of a handful of African-American students in a sea of whites. Enrolment in the college preparatory course meant that he followed William’s footsteps with a largely classical education, focusing on Latin, German, and English, as well as mathematics, the sciences, and ancient history. He played baseball, basketball, and football, quickly becoming the star of the high-school football team. He edited the school paper, he acted with the drama group, he sang with the glee club, he spoke in the debating society. Every so often, when his father was ill or absent, he preached at the church.

Later, pupils from Somerville High remembered Paul with great affection. He was universally liked, they said, easygoing and kind, modest about his achievements. The teachers cherished his courtesy and intellect; the students hailed him as an athletic hero, the school’s best player in every sport. Yet, at a white institution, a barrier always remained. Paul rarely attended school social events, for instance. It was safer if he didn’t: as he said, ‘There was always the feeling that — well, something unpleasant might happen,’ especially since the principal, a certain Dr Ackerman, was an overt racist.

In another circumstance, an African-American boy so athletically talented might have been channelled exclusively into sports. But William cherished education, never expecting less from his son than academic perfection. If Paul returned home with a test score in the nineties, William would ask why he hadn’t obtained one hundred — and then help him practise to ensure improvement.

Paul graduated top of the class his first year in Somerville. ‘Pop was pleased by that, I guess,’ he wrote, ‘though it was only what he expected of me, and his attitude never allowed for feelings of exaggerated self-esteem.’

Looking down at William’s grave, I remembered how Pauli speculated about William’s tutelage and its consequences for Paul.

‘My father was always extremely reluctant to talk to me about [William’s] personality,’ Pauli wrote, ‘as if some painful memories were associated with such recollections. Reverend Robeson was often silent and remote at home, rarely dispensing praise and unlikely to demonstrate affection. Though he was a devoted family man who was respected and loved by all the Robeson children, he was also feared. Quick to anger and short on humour, he could not have failed to demand excellence from each of them.’

In public, however, Paul always defended William’s methods. Certainly, they produced results. In his last year of high school, Paul learned of a scholarship to Rutgers. He crammed furiously, spurred on, he said, by the good wishes of his friends and the ill will of Dr Ackerman — and, most of all, by a sense that ‘Pop’s quiet confidence had to be justified’. He later described winning a place at Rutgers as a defining event in his life, an achievement by which he proved to his own satisfaction that he was not inferior to the whites who denied him equality.

And that was his father’s point. William’s insistence on individual accomplishment was a political strategy as much as a pedagogic technique. Paul wrote that he didn’t know where his father stood in the great debate between ‘the militant policy of W.E.B. Du Bois and the conservative preachments of Booker T. Washington’. But Du Bois and Washington were as one in arguing that talented black men needed to achieve their potential, thus giving a practical demonstration of what African Americans could accomplish. And it was an attitude that William shared.

At Rutgers, the Reverend Robeson watched his son accumulate academic and other trophies, triumphs that were never within William’s own reach. Paul won fourteen varsity letters; he headed the debating team; he joined Phi Beta Kappa, an honour accorded to those deemed the best representatives of the college’s ideals.

In 1918, the old man took sick, with his son scheduled to compete in yet another oratorical prize. From his deathbed, Reverend Robeson delivered a final command. ‘I don’t care what happens to me. I want you to go and give your speech, and I want you to win.’

Paul did, and his father died, true to his stern code until the end.

Shirley’s voice snapped me back to the present. ‘Let’s keep moving.’ I followed her further into the enormous cemetery, where she pointed to headstones in an area once known as ‘the coloured section’. ‘This woman here, her father owned two buildings on Green Street. His daughter also had a shop where she made her own hair products. But she only catered to white women. When I was little, I went to her to get my hair washed. She washed my hair out the back so that white women would not know that she had someone coloured in her shop.’

I tried to imagine how that must have felt. ‘How did you react?’

‘I didn’t understand. Back then, I didn’t really know about segregation. Our parents never spoke about it ... We knew that we lived in an area that was all coloured, but we just thought that was what we did. We went to the Playhouse movie theatre and we went to the back and sat on the right-hand side. No one told us that’s where we had to sit; we just knew that was where we always went. But once I went to school and we were treated differently, that’s when I knew what segregation was. And it was hard. It was hard.’

‘When you think back on that, are you bitter?’

‘Sometimes. Because it has continued. When I think of things like Ferguson, like the man [Eric Garner] who was choked to death for selling cigarettes in New York, saying “I can’t breathe” while they choked him, I am bitter. But I wasn’t bitter growing up because I had a good childhood. That’s why, now that the old community is breaking down and people are dying, I’m trying real hard to keep all this history before I pass.’

She gestured elsewhere, waving at one grave after another. ‘Right there, those are my relatives. That’s my mom, and I’m waiting for her tombstone to come. That’s my uncle, and that’s my grandma who taught Paul Robeson, and I’ll be buried behind her.’

The last was a matter-of-fact statement, expressed in the casual tone one might explain a luncheon engagement. For Shirley, community extended even to mortality, so that being interred with one’s family was a source of comfort and security, and death almost a homecoming — a reunion with those she loved. Listening to her, I remembered how deeply Paul had treasured his community. He’d once commented that, while he recognised the scholarship to Rutgers as an achievement, he’d never really wanted to go there. He’d have preferred Lincoln, for at a black institution he’d have been among friends.

In a birthday message to Paul in the 1940s, at the peak of his success, the African-American educator Mary McLeod Bethune called him ‘the tallest tree in our forest’. The tribute, encapsulating what he meant to so many, was often repeated by Paul’s admirers. But few recognised the essential loneliness of the image.

After farewelling Shirley, I walked back the way I’d come, heading up Witherspoon Street towards the university. Nassau Street took its name from Nassau Hall, which dated from 1756. In 1783, the hall briefly served as the temporary capital of the nation, when the Confederation Congress met there after fleeing Philadelphia. The vast Georgian Colonial structure had been substantially refurbished since then, fitted out in an ostentatious Italianate renovation in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it remained at the heart of the campus, as it always had — an imposing embodiment of Ivy League prestige, with three sweeping paths cross-sectioning at its entrance.

I paused at the wrought-iron FitzRandolph gates, named after the man who’d donated the college’s original land. It struck me that William Robeson must have walked here, making his way between the columns when he came to convince Woodrow Wilson, the university’s president, to enrol Paul’s brother Bill.

Princeton regulations provided no legal basis to bar pupils on grounds of colour. But that didn’t matter. Such exclusions were often a result of racialised etiquette rather than statutory bans. Wilson understood that the ‘racial purity’ of his institution mattered greatly to Southern students. A reputation for upholding white supremacy made Princeton the only Yankee university they trusted.

Though Bill was undeniably clever, for Wilson and the university administrators, the Reverend Robeson’s insistence on pushing his son’s case was insolence — so much so that it probably contributed to William’s dismissal from the Witherspoon Church.

To the right of the gate, I could see the Nassau Presbyterian Church — the impressive Greek Revival building that traditionally housed the white counterpart to William’s little congregation. Paul had spent his childhood looking up Witherspoon Street at the churchmen who ruined his father, and the college from which he and his siblings were forever excluded.

That was why his Rutgers scholarship mattered so much.

Paul was just seventeen when he jogged out onto the Rutgers football field for the first time. At 188 centimetres and 87 kilograms, he wasn’t particularly huge by today’s standards. In 1915, though, those figures made him a giant.

‘There’s a big darky on the field,’ the Rutgers football coach, George Foster Sanford, had warned the other players. ‘If you want him, OK; if not, OK.’

‘Send him out,’ said one of them. ‘We’ll kill him.’

Paul was well acquainted with the intricate web of restrictions by which segregation was enforced. He could not eat in restaurants with his classmates. He could not stay in certain expensive hotels. He couldn’t even order alongside white patrons in a drugstore.

Whether he could play football in an almost completely white competition remained unclear.

Ominously, none of the other players spoke when Paul greeted them. Then, when the whistle blew, they fell upon him.

In 1915, American football was brutal. A decade earlier, the deaths of eighteen students in a season had prompted a few rule changes, most notably the introduction of forward passing. But the game remained unabashedly violent.

The white players tried to hurt Paul however they could. When the whistle sounded, he could barely walk. His nose was broken, his shoulder thrown out, and his body stippled with cuts and bruises. It took ten days for him to recover.

Not surprisingly, while recuperating in bed, Paul decided he would abandon college football. All through high school, he had endured similar violence — and the same indifference from the coaches and referees. As he told his older brother Ben, he was weary of being brutalised by white people.

Many years later, Paul remembered what had changed his mind. ‘I didn’t know whether I could take any more. But my father … had impressed on me that when I was out on a football field or in a classroom or just anywhere else, I wasn’t just there on my own. I was the representative of a lot of Negro boys who wanted to play football and wanted to go to college and, as their representative, I had to show that I could take whatever was handed out.’

For that reason, he dragged himself back.

The second session began like the first. The white players didn’t acknowledge him before the game, and then they pummelled him on the field whenever they could. At the end of the play, Paul was lying on his back, desperately catching his breath, when a student called Frank Kelly stomped on his hand to break his fingers.

Suddenly, an enraged Paul no longer cared about the ball or the game or the team. As the players rushed at him, he knocked three of them over — and then he lifted Kelly into the air.

‘I wanted to kill him and I meant to kill him,’ he explained later in an interview. ‘It wasn’t a thought, it was just a feeling, to kill. I got Kelly in my two hands and I got him over my head — like this. I was going to smash him so hard to the ground that I’d break him in two, and I could have done it.’

But Coach Sanford, seeing what was about to happen, yelled, ‘Robey, you’re on the varsity,’ a call that snapped Paul out of his rage.

He’d won a kind of acceptance — but only a kind.

During his university career, Paul proved himself one of the greatest American footballers of a generation, so much so that Coach Sanford designed Rutgers’ game-day tactics specifically to exploit his star’s manifold talents. Paul could run. He could throw. His weight and size made him almost impossible to stop; his tackle took down opponents with emphatic finality. At the time, college football (rather than the professional code) was the game that counted, and Paul’s role in Rutgers’ upset win over the Newport Naval Reserves in November 1917 attracted national attention.

‘Robeson of Rutgers’, the press called him, ‘The Magnificent Robeson’, a ‘super-man of the game’. Yet, even as he was twice named in the College Football All-American Team, Southern players made a point of snubbing him, sometimes insisting that they would not run out while he remained on the field.

William, of course, had instructed his son that, as a black player in a white competition, he could not break any rules. Paul remained faithful to the letter of that injunction — if not quite the spirit. ‘I can honestly tell you,’ he later said to his friends, ‘that never, I mean never, not once while I was playing college football, did I use my hands illegally. And, as you know, most players always use their hands illegally if they can get away with it. I never, never did. But I’ll tell you what I did do: I practiced breaking orange crates with my forearm.’

I walked through the gates and onto the neat lawns frosted by snow in search of Stanhope Hall, the third-oldest building on the campus. Once known as the Geological Hall, it now hosted the Center for African American Studies.

In a basement room, I found Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor sitting behind her computer, a desk jumbled with books and papers. She was much younger than Shirley, and in a long shirt and jeans, with close-cropped hair. Having grown up in the South and then lived in Chicago, she lacked Shirley’s emotional investment in the town’s history. ‘It’s incredibly wealthy here,’ she told me, with evident distaste, ‘and it’s incredibly white: it’s like old, aristocratic, affluent America. That’s part of the reason why I live in Philadelphia and commute. Princeton’s the furtherest south of any of the Ivy League universities, and people talk about an ethos of Southern gentility, which gets expressed as a passive-aggressive, buttoned-up culture.’

‘The theology was Calvin; the religion, cash,’ Paul had quipped about Princeton. Keeanga-Yamahtta’s disdain came from a similar register.

Still, something like six per cent of those currently enrolled were African American, and I’d read that the campus was seeing vocal protests against police killings from Black Lives Matter activists. Princeton’s Center for African American Studies had its own building and the capacity to hire its own faculty, which was, as Keeanga-Yamahtta said, a significant departure from the usual academic attitude to a discipline often dismissed as marginal.

By the time of my visit, overt segregation had long vanished from Princeton, just as it had been abolished everywhere else. But it was difficult for an outsider like me to understand how integrated America was in practice. Would a young African-American man today still encounter the white world as something foreign, a sphere entirely separate from his own experiences?

‘It’s an interesting question,’ Keeanga-Yamahtta said. She thought for a minute. ‘According to the census, there are more biracial relationships than ever, more biracial marriages, and more people who declare themselves biracial … But that’s not necessarily reflected in [patterns of] where people live and thus where people go to school. For wealthy blacks, there’s much more integration in terms of school and social life than for the majority of working-class and poor African Americans. There’s a significantly larger black elite today.’

Chicago, for instance, remained largely divided on racial lines, with almost thirty kilometres of solidly black areas where working-class kids could go most of their lives without interacting with a white peer. In fact, she said, often the only white people they encountered were policemen or other authority or administrative figures. ‘So it is also about residential segregation. American cities are either as segregated or more segregated than they were forty or forty-five years ago, during the last period of sustained social movements. Schools are supposed to be neighbourhood-based and so, when you have this intense segregation in neighbourhoods, the schools reflect that.’

At Rutgers, Paul’s life was structured like that of any other privileged young gentleman at an elite institution. He was expected to dress and speak well; he was inducted into the various rituals of college culture; he studied a classical syllabus. Yet he was also barred from much that his peers took for granted. He couldn’t attend student socials, since a black man dancing with white girls was unthinkable. He was never invited to join the glee club (even though he occasionally sang at Rutgers concerts), for many would have considered his participation in a tour an embarrassment. Only once was he asked to the traditional celebrations for the football team in which he starred, and that seems to have been by error. As one of his teammates remembered, ‘coloured people were not accepted in hotels and public restaurants, so whenever there was a banquet for the footballers, Paul always arranged, gracefully, to have some other place to go.’ When the squad played an away match, Paul invariably told the manager he’d organise his own food and accommodation — for, if he had not, he would have become a liability, since there was no prospect of him eating or staying with the others.

All of this meant that, even as Paul won academic and sporting accolades at Rutgers, he did much of his socialising in the largely separate African-American community, where he was already gaining a public profile. The local Somerville paper reported regularly on his accomplishments and achievements, and African-American parents held him up to their children as an example to be emulated. Whenever he felt too great a pressure to live up to their expectations, he visited friends in Princeton, Trenton, Philadelphia, Newark, and New York: places where he wasn’t so well known as the preacher’s son. He also played semi-professional basketball for a Harlem team, an activity that brought him much-needed cash and the opportunity to interact with teammates in a setting that could not be more different from the Rutgers football field.

Both Paul and William expected that Rutgers would guarantee him a life of upper-middle-class respectability. Today, though, Keeanga-Yamahtta said, the African-American middle class felt increasingly under pressure. The economic crisis of 2008 hit black communities first, before it crashed the national economy, with something like half of the African Americans who had recently purchased houses losing their homes. It was, she said, the most catastrophic loss of wealth since the collapse of the Freedman’s Savings Bank in the aftermath of Reconstruction in the nineteenth century.

The economic crisis had also taken place in a context where traditional African-American institutions no longer seemed nearly as relevant to their constituency. Keeanga-Yamahtta shook her head violently when I asked whether religion was as central to the African-American community as it had been during Paul’s youth. ‘Oh no! No. Look, there are many reasons why the black church was central in the earlier twentieth century, many of which have to do with the institutional instability of everything else. It was one institution that could not be manipulated by whites in quite the same way. Today, though, the church — and religion in general — are simply less of a factor in all of American life.’

There was, she said, a deep generational divide when it came to the church, something that had become obvious in the 2014 protests in Ferguson and after other police shootings. ‘There’s been a much more conservative reaction from those in the civil-rights establishment with deeper roots in the church compared to young people, who are, after all, the ones who are being subjected to this police terrorism. That hasn’t helped the stature of the black church in the eyes of many young people.’

She quoted statistics from The Guardian showing that police had killed an astonishing 928 people a year over eight recent years, a number more than twice as large as the official toll. Most experts regarded that tally as an underestimate, since, until 2016, authorities simply didn’t keep accurate figures about so-called ‘law enforcement homicides’. ‘And if we know that the police are twenty-one times more likely to be shooting young black men than white men, then we know the majority of those who are being killed. It’s no wonder we’re seeing a reaction from black millennials. These are people who have come of age in a time of endless war, economic crisis, and police murder, and they’re the fulcrum of all of this.

‘Police brutality, police murder: it’s getting worse. And it’s one issue about which there’s really no way to register a complaint, for not only do the police exist above the law but they’re a protected class about which no politician will ever complain, no public figure will ever say a single disparaging word about. There is literally nowhere to go if you want to complain about the police, other than to take to the streets. In Ferguson, you already had a very corrupt police force — about which everyone knows now — but the murder of Mike Brown was really transformed when they left his body out on the street for four and a half hours. That transformed the death from a typical police shooting to something like a lynching. It was a signal to people in Ferguson, a signal that the situation could still get worse in terms of brutality.’

I found myself thinking, listening to her words, of an incident during Paul’s college years.

On 2 April 1917, Woodrow Wilson had announced the United States’ commitment to war with Germany. The man who’d excluded Paul’s brother from Princeton now said that the world ‘must be made safe for democracy’. But there was a coda to his declaration of principles.

‘If there should be disloyalty,’ said the President, ‘it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression.’

Rutgers soon glimpsed what that might mean. On 23 April, a professor instructed his class to deliver speeches in support of the government’s Liberty Loan scheme. One freshman, a youth named Samuel Chovenson, refused. The proposed oration implied a public endorsement of the war, something Chovenson wouldn’t give. Accordingly, as the local paper reported, ‘word of his seditious actions rapidly went the rounds of the student body, stirring up the patriotic young men, until every one was demanding that some action be taken’.

That action was a lynching.

The students seized Chovenson and imprisoned him in a dormitory for five hours. Eventually, he was dragged before a four-hundred-strong crowd, stripped, and smeared with molasses and feathers. His captors blindfolded him, tied him to a plank, and paraded him down George Street, carrying signs denouncing him as a ‘Bolsheviki’ and a ‘pro-German’.

From the sidewalk, onlookers (including many soldiers) demanded what the paper called ‘more severe punishment’. A public execution was eminently possible, not least because the name Chovenson sounded distinctly foreign. Eventually, the young man was released on the corner of George and Albany Streets, beaten and terrified but still alive.

Paul was not on campus at the time. But what he heard later — an incident so reminiscent of a KKK intervention — must have reminded him, once again, to be careful. If his fellow students would handle a dissident white man like that, what would they do to an African American who stepped out of place? Baker’s death was a lesson; the Wilmington coup was a lesson; William’s dismissal was a lesson — and Paul knew only too well how to read what had been done to Chovenson.

He was by no means a radical himself. The Russian ‘Bolsheviki’ did not interest him, for he fully supported the struggle against Germany. He served in the Reserve Officers Training Corps program, and the prize-winning speech he gave just after his father’s death was titled ‘Loyalty and the American Negro’. His situation was quite different to what Keeanga-Yamahtta described. He was on an upward trajectory, with every reason for optimism about the future.

Which didn’t mean, of course, he was unaffected by the racism that surrounded him. His football teammates judged Paul ‘a nice, placid, kind guy’ who had ‘great control of himself; he never blew his top, he didn’t have a short fuse’. It would be more accurate to say that he kept his rage tightly in check — so much so that, during his acting career, whenever Paul wanted to portray anger, he would think back to what he’d endured as a college athlete.

In 1896, the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar described the duplicity expected of black men, writing of the ‘mask that grins and lies’. Paul adopted a similar strategy — except that for him, sport occasionally provided an outlet to strike back safely. In one match against West Virginia, Paul was allowed to start, against the objections of his opponents. When the players lined up for the whistle, the white youth opposite Paul leaned forward and hissed, ‘Don’t you so much as touch me, you black dog, or I’ll cut your heart out.’

‘Can you imagine?’ Paul told friends later. ‘I’m playing opposite him in a football game and he says I’m not to touch him. When the whistle blew, I dove in and he didn’t see me coming. I clipped him sidewise and nearly busted him in two, and as we were lying under the pile I leaned forward and whispered, “I touched you that time. How did you like it?”’

For the most part, though, Paul cleaved to the strategy drummed into him by his father and then reinforced by his own experiences. Overt resistance would be crushed. You could only evade the restrictions of the white order if you achieved a position of respectability and prominence — and even then you needed to take great care with your response.

Keeanga-Yamahtta suggested that, for most young African Americans today, that kind of conciliation no longer seemed possible. The new activism was, she said, driven by desperation, a sense of grim necessity. ‘The level of inequality now is so extreme, and this country is just crazy. That’s why with policing, well, they’ve basically just unchained the police. There’s an entire twentieth-century history of police violence and harassment and it’s nothing like what we’re seeing today.’

I needed to understand, Keeanga-Yamahtta said, that political lessons could go both ways.

That was something else Ferguson had shown. If the treatment of Michael Brown had been intended as a warning, it had failed, for the people in Ferguson refused to be cowed. They came onto the streets. They protested. They spoke out. And, through their courage, the climate had been transformed. ‘Because of their refusal to let the issue die,’ she said, ‘Ferguson provided a model, one that others could use in response to police shootings. Which is what we’ve seen since.’

I pondered on that final comment during the bus ride to New York. Throughout Paul’s childhood, his father had told him that his achievements would inspire others. That was why, for instance, William insisted Paul stick with football: there was more at stake than Paul’s own preferences. Later, Paul downplayed the political significance of his individual accomplishments, conscious that his personal success might be used by conservatives to minimise the structural barriers holding back other African Americans. Besides, he’d come to reject his father’s model of self-improvement as a means of social change.

Yet, in a way, William’s point retained its validity.

The activists in Ferguson had forged a template for communities grappling with police violence. They had shown the possibility of defiance and shattered the fear on which impunity rested. Hadn’t that always been the same? Didn’t every struggle, no matter how spontaneous, depend on someone being willing to go first, to put their body on the line to prove the viability of resistance?

Despite all that had changed, I could still see a parallel. The stances that Paul took as an adult — his opposition to segregation and, ultimately, to capitalism — provided a model, a political example that others could (and did) imitate.

That was why it became so important to destroy him.