chapter 2

a motherless child

—“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”

“The glory of my boyhood years was my father,” wrote Paul Robeson. “I loved him like no one in all the world.” When Paul later gave concerts, he sang spirituals his father might have sung on the plantation, such as “Many Thousan’ Gone”:

No more auction block for me

No more, no more

No more auction block for me

Many thousan’ gone

His father, William Drew Robeson, was born enslaved in Martin County, North Carolina. At age fifteen, William escaped and made his way to Pennsylvania on the Underground Railroad, a network of safe houses providing shelter to help enslaved people travel north so they could live free. Working as a farmhand, he earned tuition for Lincoln University, the first college in America granting degrees to black students. William took courses in Latin and Greek, and he graduated in 1873 with honors. Three years later, he earned a degree in sacred theology, and became a minister.

Paul described his father’s speaking voice as the “greatest” he had ever heard, “a deep, sonorous basso, richly melodic and refined.” When Robeson performed, he would affectionately imitate his father delivering a sermon in a “voice going down like an organ.”

Paul’s father, Reverend William Drew Robeson, at age sixty-five in 1910

While William was a divinity student at Lincoln, he met and fell in love with Maria Louisa Bustill, a young teacher from Philadelphia. Louisa, as she was called, was a tall, slender woman with a keen mind and remarkable memory. She was also known for her gentle manner and cheerful disposition. Often, she visited her uncle who lived in Lincoln, Pennsylvania. Louisa came from one of Philadelphia’s prominent black families. The Bustills descended from freeborn African Americans, and family members had intermarried with English Quakers and people of the Lenni-Lenape Indians who lived in what is now Delaware. One of the Bustills had been a member of the Underground Railroad chain and had helped over a thousand enslaved people gain freedom.

William and Louisa married in 1878, and settled in Princeton, New Jersey. He was appointed pastor of the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church. Louisa, like William, was highly intelligent as well as deeply religious, and she helped her husband compose his sermons. They lived in the parsonage a few doors down from the church. There, they raised their children: William Drew, Jr. (called Bill), Reeve, Benjamin (Ben), a daughter Marian, and the youngest, Paul Leroy, born April 9, 1898. As the baby of the family, Paul was the favorite, and his siblings doted on him.

Paul’s mother, Maria Louisa Bustill Robeson, 1878, age twenty-five, at the time of her marriage

The house where Paul Robeson was born at 110 Witherspoon Street, Princeton, New Jersey

When Paul was two years old, his older brother Bill tried to enroll at Princeton University but was turned down. At that time, the beginning of the twentieth century, the town of Princeton was segregated like a Southern Jim Crow town. Black people were not welcome at white shops or restaurants up on Nassau Street. As Paul wrote, “Almost every Negro in Princeton lived off the college and accepted the social status that went with it. We lived for all intents and purposes on a Southern plantation.” At the movie theater, they had to sit in the back section. The one black physician in town was refused staff privileges at the Princeton Medical Center and Hospital, so his patients had to go to a hospital in Trenton. The university itself was off-limits to black students. Even the gate at the entrance of the campus “was always locked shut. It was never open—never,” recalled a resident of the black Witherspoon Street neighborhood.

Nevertheless, Reverend Robeson went to see Woodrow Wilson, a professor at Princeton and the future president of the university. Wilson was also a governing elder of the Presbyterian Church. Reverend Robeson appealed to Wilson to admit his brilliant son Bill to the college. Wilson angrily declared that Princeton did not accept “colored.” This incident may have been the reason Reverend Robeson lost his ministry in 1901.

Other factors played a role as well. The reverend had developed the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church as a center of civic and social activity for the black community. Congregants knew him as “the defender of justice,” standing firmly for the rights of his race. However, white Presbyterians still controlled the church and forced him out. Initially, they criticized him for not making the church financially independent. Yet an investigation showed that nothing was amiss. Certain white residents of Princeton were said to want the reverend to stop speaking out against lynching and race riots, which he refused to do. Many years later, Reverend Robeson received an apology from the Presbyterian Church for the injustice done to him.

The Robeson family moved from the parsonage to a run-down house around the corner on Green Street. Paul later described it as a “shack” that was “so bad it should have been condemned.” His father earned a little money by hauling ashes from white people’s fireplaces in a horse-drawn wagon and driving Princeton University students around town. Paul admired his father for never complaining and wrote, “He was still the dignified Reverend Robeson to the community, and no man carried himself with greater pride.”

Paul’s mother suffered from chronic asthma and cataracts in her eyes that left her nearly blind. She depended on Paul and Ben, who were still living at home, to lead her about the house. A family friend observed that Paul was his mother’s “little guide and inseparable” from her.

One morning in January 1904, Reverend Robeson went shopping in Trenton. Paul was at the Witherspoon School for Colored Children down the street from his father’s former church. Ben, age eleven, had stayed home to help his mother. Louisa asked Ben to put a piece of new linoleum under the stove. As they tipped the stove, the door flew open. Hot coals fell on Louisa’s long dress, and her skirt caught fire. Ben tried to stamp out the flames. He ran out of the house screaming for help. Neighbors passing by rushed inside and found Louisa ablaze. Someone grabbed a bucket of snow to douse the flames. By the time they put out the fire, Louisa was horribly burned. A doctor arrived and gave her medicine to relieve the excruciating pain.

When Paul returned home from school he watched helplessly. A few hours later, she died. Paul was five years old. “I remember her lying in the coffin, and the funeral, and the relatives who came,” he wrote. “But it must be that the pain and shock of her death blotted out all other personal recollections.”

His mother was buried in the white section of the Princeton Cemetery. The Presbyterian church owned the cemetery and gave Reverend Robeson special permission to have her buried there, near where they lived. Her grave is close to the cemetery gate on Witherspoon Street that Paul passed every day as he went to and from school.

Witherspoon School for Colored Children, 1904. Paul Robeson, age 6, is probably in the front row, second boy to the left of the pole.

The Princeton YMCA football team champions in 1908. The boy in the second row holding the football is Ben Robeson, Paul’s older brother.

“There must have been moments when I felt the sorrows of a motherless child,” he wrote. Singing released his deepest feelings. Years later, at his debut concert, Paul sang, “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” and tears streamed down his face. A friend who was at the concert said that she “was crying too, and so was half the audience.”