Rutgers College
(1915–1918)
Founded in 1766, Rutgers was one of the country’s oldest colleges; yet in 1915, when Robeson entered, it was still a private school with fewer than five hundred students, bearing scant resemblance to the academic colossus it subsequently became. Prior to the Civil War, Rutgers had denied admittance to Afro-Americans (Princeton continued to refuse them admission until World War II), and only two had officially attended the school before Robeson—though rumor had it that an additional few had in another sense “passed” through its portals. The year after Robeson entered, a second black student, Robert Davenport, enrolled, and “Davvy” and “Robey” (as they were known during their undergraduate years) became good friends, joining a scattering of other black collegians from the Philadelphia-Trenton-New York corridor to form a social circle. They would need each other.1
Robeson’s path at Rutgers was centrally defined by his race, though not—thanks to his own magnetism and talent—centrally circumscribed by it. The simple fact of his dark skin was sufficient to bring down on him a predictable number of indignities, but his own settled self-respect kept them from turning into disabling wounds. He further learned at Rutgers what had become almost instinctual knowledge: achievement could win from whites respect and applause, sometimes friendship, but almost never intimacy.
When freshman Robeson walked onto the practice field to try out for Rutgers football, the team had no blacks on it—indeed, like almost every other top-ranked college, Rutgers had never in its history had a black player. In a day when football players typically lacked the mammoth height and girth they have today (five members of the 1917 Rutgers team were five feet, nine inches or shorter), Paul, at six feet, two inches, and 190 pounds, stood some three to four inches taller and weighed some 20 pounds more than most others on the field.2
The “giant’s” reputation had preceded him. Rutgers coach G. Foster Sanford had seen him play for Somerville and had been duly impressed. The Rutgers first-stringers had also heard about Robey’s athletic prowess—and skin color. Several of them set out to prevent him from making the team. On the first day of scrimmage, they piled on, leaving Robeson with a broken nose (which troubled him ever after as a singer), a sprained right shoulder, and assorted cuts and bruises. He could hardly limp off the field. That night (as Robeson described the incident thirty years later) “a very very sorry boy” had to take to bed, and stay there for ten days to repair his wounds. “It was tough going” for a seventeen-year-old and “I didn’t know whether I could take any more.” But his father had impressed upon him that “when I was out on a football field, or in a classroom, or anywhere else, I was not there just 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 I could take whatever was handed out.… Our father wouldn’t like to think that our family had a quitter in it.”3
After a visit and pep talk from brother Ben, Robeson went back out for another scrimmage. This time a varsity player brutally stomped on his hand. The bones held, but Robeson’s temper did not. On the next play, as the first-string backfield came toward him, Robeson, enraged with pain, swept out his massive arms, brought down three men, grabbed the ball carrier, and raised him over his head—“I was going to smash him so hard to the ground that I’d break him right in two”—and was stopped by a nick-in-time yell from Coach Sanford. Robeson was never again roughed up—that is, by his own teammates. Sanford, a white New Englander committed to racial equality as well as to football prowess, issued a double-barreled communiqué: Robey had made the team, and any player who tried to injure him would be dropped from it.4
Several of his teammates have subsequently downplayed the amount of racial antipathy Robeson faced on the Rutgers squad—just as whites who knew him in Somerville later minimized town prejudice. One Rutgers teammate, “Thug” Rendall, insisted sixty years later that there had been no opposition to Robey’s joining the team, and Steve White, a senior when Robeson was a freshman, flatly declared, “There was never any discrimination.” Earl Reed Silvers, who graduated two years ahead of Robeson and was later a Rutgers faculty member, claimed to have “attended every football practice” during Robeson’s freshman year and did not remember “any untoward incident on the field.” Silvers further claimed to have checked his memory with four members of the varsity squad of that season and reported that not one of them could recall a deliberate attempt to injure Robeson. In any case, Silvers felt sure, “Paul would not … wish to question the integrity of his college or the sportsmanship of his friends.”5
A comparable view is held by Coach Sanford’s son. He, too, was regularly present at team practices and insists that “a minor incident” has subsequently been blown out of all proportion. Had resentment against Robeson “been that deepseated,” Sanford, Jr., argues, it would never have subsided—yet in fact “it never showed its ugly head again.” As for Robeson’s own reported rage at being mauled, Sanford, Jr., discounts it as not believable because not in character—as “everyone knew,” Robeson was “a nice, placid, kind guy” who had “great control of himself; he never blew his top, he didn’t have a short fuse.”6
True enough. Ordinarily, Robeson as a young man did sit on his rage—though even back in Somerville he had been known once or twice to “blow his top,” showing, had anyone wished to see, that choosing to muzzle his feelings was not the equivalent of not having feelings, or any guarantee that under special provocation they would not surface. Later in life Robeson told a friend that, although he had never used his hands illegally while playing college football, he did practice breaking up orange crates with his forearm. As for the amount of provocation he actually faced, the bland minimizations of Sanford, Jr., and others are overmatched by countertestimony. Robert Nash, another member of the varsity squad, flatly states that Robeson “took a terrific beating.… We gave him a tough time during the practices; it was like initiation. He took it well, though.” And Mayne S. Mason, an instructor of physics and one of Robeson’s teachers, remembers him coming into his lab one day with his hand bandaged; when Mason asked him what had happened, Paul simply said, “I got hurt.” Later, after everyone else had left the lab, he elaborated a bit: someone on the team had spiked his hand that day. He would say no more, but Mason later learned from another student that Robeson had picked the man up over his head as if to throw him to the ground.7
The intervention of Coach Sanford prevented overt racism from surfacing again on the Rutgers squad, and over time the initial racist reaction to Robeson was gradually replaced by admiration, and in some cases affection (end James Burke even credited him with saving his life: chasing a pass, Burke fell fifty feet over an embankment into the Raritan Canal, and Robeson raced into the water in full football gear to haul him out). Sanford himself developed great respect for Robeson’s athletic talent and great liking for him personally, a mutual regard that lasted until Sanford’s death. An unusually gifted coach, Sanford took Robeson under his wing and taught him much that honed his game—how to protect himself, how to put his arms chest-high and come up across the body with a forceful elbow (in those days the use of arms in football was restricted), how to employ (no platoon system then existed and members played for sixty minutes) his multiple skills in both offensive and defensive positions, developing particular strength as a pass receiver and a tackler.8
By the end of his freshman year, Robeson was in the starting lineup; by his junior year, he had become the star of an exceptionally talented Rutgers team and had gained national prominence—a “football genius,” raved one sportswriter, echoing many others, “the best all-round player on the gridiron this season,” “a dusky marvel.” Twice, in 1917 and 1918, Walter Camp, the legendary Yale coach, put Robeson on his All-American football teams—the first Rutgers player ever named—calling him “a veritable superman.” The phrase scarcely seemed overheated; by then, in a superfluity of skill, Robeson had also distinguished himself as center on the basketball team, catcher on the baseball team, and a competent javelin and discus thrower on the track team. By the time of his graduation, he had won fifteen varsity letters in four different sports. On the side, he played club basketball for St. Christopher, a Harlem group that was one of the best in the nation, boasting among its other players the two Jenkins brothers, Harold “Legs” and Clarence “Little Fat,” later to become legendary figures in the sport.9
All of which suggests, in bald outline, a triumphal procession, inexorable and uninterrupted. The reality was a good deal bumpier. If Coach Sanford had never been bigoted, and if the Rutgers football team was taught not to be, that still left the outside world. One classmate remembers the shouts of “nigger” that would sometimes come from the stands, and Coach Sanford’s son recalls that Robeson “was treated very badly by the opponents, not necessarily the Northern opponents but the Southern opponents.… Everybody went after him, and they did it in many ways. You could gouge, you could punch, you could kick. The officials were Southern, and he took one hell of a beating, but he was never hurt. He was never out of a game for injuries. He never got thrown off the field; when somebody punched him, he didn’t punch back. He was just tough. He was big. He had a massive, strong body, among other things. He felt the resentment but he managed to keep it under wraps.” The restraining influence was Paul himself, not Coach Sanford. One team member, Donald Storck, remembers that Sanford would sometimes encourage his players to do physical damage to the opposing team; and at least once Storck and Robeson appealed that policy directly to Sanford.10
Among Rutgers’s Southern opponents in football, William and Mary and Georgia Tech simply refused to play against a black man. A game with Washington and Lee came off only after the Rutgers administration, bowing to pressure from its alumni, ordered Sanford to bench Robeson (Rutgers in 1916 was celebrating its 150th anniversary, and the administration hoped for an outpouring of alumni gifts). Some of the Rutgers players initially protested the decision not to use Robeson against Washington and Lee, but Sanford gathered the squad together outside Kilpatrick Chapel and “explained” that it had been a matter of “courtesy” to accede to a request from the opposing team’s coach—courtesy and common sense, he said, for there was a real possibility the Washington and Lee players might gang up on Paul and injure him. Paul gave thought to quitting, but his father told him “he hadn’t sent me to college to play football, and vetoed my plan to switch colleges.…”11
When the news got out that Robeson had been benched, James D. Carr, Rutgers’s first (1892) black graduate—a Phi Beta Kappa honor student who had gone on to Columbia Law School and was currently an attorney for the city of New York—angrily protested in a letter to Rutgers President William H. S. Demarest: “Shall men, whose progenitors tried to destroy this Union, be permitted to make a mockery of our democratic ideals by robbing a youth, whose progenitors helped to save the Union, of that equality of opportunity and privilege that should be the crowning glory of our institution of learning?”12
The answer was yes. But on a second occasion Coach Sanford held his ground. When “Greasy” Neale, coach of the West Virginia team, also insisted Robeson be dropped from the roster, Sanford adamantly refused to comply. “When we lined up for the first play,” Robeson told a friend a decade later, “the man playing opposite me leaned forward and said, ‘Don’t you so much as touch me, you black dog, or I’ll cut your heart out.’ Can you imagine? 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?’” Rutgers held West Virginia, the pregame favorite, to a tie; “the giant Negro” (alternately called by the papers “the big darky”) was spotted and held down by the visitors until the final period, when he saved the game with a crucial tackle on the Rutgers two-yard line. After the game Coach Neale purportedly said, “Guts! He had nothing else but! Why that colored boy’s legs were so gashed and bruised that his skin peeled off when he removed his stockings.” “Every man in the enemy pack,” Robeson later told an interviewer, “filed in front of me and shook my black hand!”13
In 1917, in Paul’s junior year, Rutgers took on the Newport Naval Reserve, an undefeated team headed by Cupe (“Cupid”) Black and made up of eleven All-Americans. In a memorable game at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn (with Walter Camp watching from the stands), Rutgers spectacularly outplayed Newport. The Rutgers Targum reported that Robeson had seemed to be all over the field, so much so that “the Newport team began to believe that there were, at least, eleven Robesons, and their entire horizon was obscured by him.…” More than fifty years later, his performance was still vividly remembered as “brilliant.… He led the defense as a linebacker to such success that Newport made only one first down. He also caught a pass on the five-yard line and fought his way over the goal line with three defenders trying to bring him down.” And the New York Tribune said, “It was Robeson, a veritable Othello of battle, who led the dashing little Rutgers eleven to a 14–0 victory over the widely heralded Newport Naval Reserves.”14
Because the feats of “the giant Negro” extended beyond football, they could not easily be dismissed as the mere by-products of “animal vitality.” Robeson dominated not only the playing fields but the classroom—and the debating hall and the glee club and the honor societies—as well. And he did so with a modesty that further disarmed would-be detractors. “A gentle soul,” a man of “great gentleness,” is how two undergraduates who knew Robey later described him, and Coach Sanford—who was not given to hyperbole—told a newspaper reporter that Robeson “does not know the meaning of conceit” and is “one of the most likeable fellows I ever met.”15
Robeson maintained such a consistently high grade average in his course work that he was one of four undergraduates (in a class of eighty) admitted to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year. A speaker of exceptional force, he was a member of the varsity debating team and won the class oratorical prize four years in succession. His bass-baritone was the chief adornment of the glee club—but only at its home concerts; he was not invited to be a “traveling” member, and at Rutgers sang only with the stipulation that he not attend social functions after the performances.16
One reason Robeson tolerated that humiliation was his need for money. Along with doing a variety of odd jobs (including working as a porter in Grand Central Station), he used his glee-club appearances as an advertisement for the private concerts he sometimes gave to augment his scholarship. Ten years later he told a reporter, “I used to hustle around, fix up a concert, and bill myself as a star attraction. It is probable … that I attracted my audiences in the first place partly by the fact that my name was already fairly well known as a Rugger man.… I would go on the stage, sing a group of songs, orate and flourish for 20 minutes, and then sing again. Usually this procedure brought me in about ten pounds [fifty dollars], and apparently everybody was satisfied.… These early ventures were practically the whole of my stage training.”17
In the same way that Robeson was only partly accepted as a member of the glee club, so, too, was he elected to the Literary Society, Philoclean, without being allowed fully to share in its festivities. On the night the new Philoclean members were inducted, Paul was prevented from participating in the traditional ritual of “standing for a treat” at Bruns (the local ice-cream-and-candy shop) because Bruns would not serve a black man. Paul gave his financial share for the treat to his friend Charlie Bloodgood, but when Charlie said he and some of the others would protest Bruns’s policy, Paul discouraged them. He “wanted no trouble,” he said, and went home. “There was a clear line,” Robeson later wrote, “beyond which one did not pass”; college life was “on the surface marvellous, but it was a thing apart.”18
In that same spirit, Paul once let his teammate Donald Storck persuade him to go to a college dance—but positioned himself on the balcony, where, to wild applause, he serenaded the dancers below with “Roses of Picardy.” Storck marveled at his friend’s calm exterior but recognized that he was “roiling” inside. By others, however, Paul’s prudent self-possession was often mistaken for nonchalance. An undergraduate two years behind him sent him myopic congratulations later in life on the attitude he had shown: “I will never forget how much you seemed to enjoy watching, though never participating in any of the social affairs of your contemporaries.… This was but one of your most typical, admirable qualities that endeared you to all who knew you. It was in keeping with your modesty.…”19
Now and then during his undergraduate years, when under unusual pressure, Robeson let whites glimpse a less placid side. One such moment came at the close of his junior year. In May his father suddenly and unexpectedly died at age seventy-three. While lying gravely ill, Reverend Robeson had extracted his son’s promise to go ahead with his commitment to compete in—and win—an oratorical contest scheduled for a few days hence. Three days after his father’s death, a distraught Paul reluctantly kept his promise and mounted the lecture platform, surrounded by supportive friends. “Paul stood there on the stage,” one of them recalls, “gaunt, sombre, obviously steeped in grief as he talked in that beautiful, moving voice.” Defenses down, Paul spoke in less measured, benign terms than was his usual style. He pointedly remonstrated with the largely white audience for the inadequate educational opportunities offered blacks—and emphasized, by way of contrast, the distinction with which they continued to fight in the country’s wars. In later life, as it became ever clearer to him that white America was unlikely to extend its paper principles of equality (and certainly not without a persistent, militant demand that it do so), Robeson would return often to the paradox of black Americans, denied first-class citizenship, fighting and dying in the nation’s armed forces—and he would ultimately counsel them not to.20
The following year, his last at Rutgers, Robeson used another public occasion to reiterate his determination to make of his own life a fitting memorial to his father’s, a vehicle for helping “the race to a higher life.” When it came time to write his senior thesis, he chose for his topic “The Fourteenth Amendment, the Sleeping Giant of the American Constitution”—and proceeded to interpret it in a way that prefigured the eventual use of that amendment as a civil-rights weapon. In his trademark public tone of measured courtesy, and encased in legalistic citation, Robeson entered a plea “for utilizing the potential force of the proviso to ensure equality before the law”; let the amendment “be duly observed,” he wrote, and “the American people shall develop a higher sense of constitutional morality.” The gist of Robeson’s argument was unequivocally a call to work within the system, and its rhetoric was glowingly—some would say, from the vantage point of seventy years later, naïvely—optimistic about white intentions. Yet, once again, beneath the conventional packaging lay some potentially unconventional views. And his white professor spotted them: he penciled across Robeson’s thesis “Extravagant”—though conceivably he was referring to Robeson’s optimism.21
In his senior year Robeson was inducted into the Cap and Skull honor society as one of four men who best represented the ideals of Rutgers, and was also selected as valedictorian of the graduating class. President Demarest of Rutgers asked Paul to give the Commencement Oration on six days’ notice, after the scheduled student became ill. Demarest called Paul into his office and asked if “he had an old speech” he could give, since six days was scant time for writing and memorizing a new one. Paul said he did, but added that he would prefer to try a new effort that (as Demarest later remembered his words) would “touch upon the racial question” and would “show the dawn of a renaissance for the Negro.” Paul explained that this idea was “burning in his soul for expression.” Demarest told him to go ahead.22
As Paul made his way down the aisle to the speaker’s stand on Commencement Day, the board of trustees, the faculty, the many distinguished guests and recipients of honorary degrees all rose, in a rare and perhaps unprecedented tribute, and remained standing until he had reached the platform. He proceeded to deliver a stirring speech, “The New Idealism,” in which he carefully alternated patriotic cadences with temperate (yet unmistakable) challenge. In theme and tone the young Robeson sounded far closer to Booker T. Washington than to “upstart” militants like W. E. B. Du Bois and Monroe Trotter. Dutifully praising the nation for having “proved true to her trust,” and her soldiers for having successfully preserved her “liberties” in the recently concluded war, Robeson went on to restate Booker T. Washington’s familiar doctrines of racial progress through self-help. “We of this less favored race realize,” he told the Commencement Day audience, “that our future lies chiefly in our own hands. On ourselves alone will depend the preservation of our liberties and the transmission of them in their integrity to those who will come after us. And we are struggling on attempting to show that knowledge can be obtained under difficulties; that poverty may give place to affluence; that obscurity is not an absolute bar to distinction, and that a way is open to welfare and happiness to all who will follow the way with resolution and wisdom; that neither the old-time slavery, nor continued prejudice need extinguish self-respect, crush manly ambition or paralyze effort; that no power outside of himself can prevent a man from sustaining an honorable character and a useful relation to his day and generation.”23
But of course it could and did, as Robeson well knew, and as he gently asserted in his concluding remarks. While calling on his own race to practice the “virtues of self-reliance, self-respect, industry, perseverance and economy,” he added that “in order for us to successfully do all these things it is necessary that you of the favored race catch a new vision,” act according to a new spirit of “compassion” in relieving “the manifest distress of your fellows.” It remained true, he emphasized, that “neither institutions nor friends can make a race stand unless it has strength in its own foundation; that races like individuals must stand or fall by their own merit,” and he was careful to assure his almost entirely white audience that the new “fraternal spirit” he wished to evoke “does not necessarily mean intimacy, or personal friendship.” It implied only “courtesy and fair-mindedness,” a willingness to fight for the great principle that “there will be equal opportunities for all.” Robeson closed his oration with words closer in spirit to those Du Bois might have chosen, though the tone remained conciliatory rather than militant: “… may I not appeal to you … to fight for” an “ideal government” whereby “character shall be the standard of excellence … where an injury to the meanest citizen is an insult to the whole constitution,” and where “black and white shall clasp friendly hands in the consciousness of the fact that we are brethren and that God is the father of us all.” The Commencement Day crowd roared its approval.24
Robeson’s cautious yet challenging valedictory words were as far as he ever went, as a young man, in expressing in front of whites something of the range of his feelings. He talked less guardedly only among his circle of black friends, that small group of collegians, male and female, drawn from the Philadelphia-New York area and (as one of them has put it) from “well-to-do middle class homes.… We met regularly for dances, forums, picnics, athletic games, and the usual events that engage college students. There were also profound discussions about the Negro in our society.” Sadie Goode, who dated (and later married) Robert Davenport, the black student a year behind Robeson at Rutgers, recalls Paul as distinctly “aware and disturbed” about racial questions. Another young black woman, Frances Quiett, who met Robeson soon after he graduated from Rutgers and dated him seriously for a year, remembers his talking about the prejudice he had encountered growing up in Princeton: “He was race-conscious at an early stage,” and “it showed when we met in groups together.” Robeson would often draw the others (who were “not as aware”) into a serious discussion of racial prejudice, and would describe the hopes he had of someday being able “to do something about it”—though “he wasn’t clear at that early age about what he might be able to do.”25
Of his contemporaries, Robeson was probably closest in these years to Geraldine Maimie Neale, the young black woman with whom he had an intense undergraduate romance. They met when he was a sophomore and Gerry was completing high school in a nearby town; his last two years at Rutgers paralleled her two years at Teachers Normal School in Trenton, where she trained as a kindergarten teacher and also took newly introduced special-education courses for teaching mentally retarded children.26
She and Paul did not see each other, according to Gerry Neale, “frequently, as students do today. There were no automobiles among us. We were both serious students.” Paul would call on Gerry at the boarding-house in Trenton where she roomed with other students; they wrote letters to each other between visits, and with other friends had song fests in parents’ living rooms (Paul never had to be coaxed: “If he was asked to sing, he made no excuse, set no limitations,” and sang everything from the Sorrow Songs to love songs. “I Love You Truly” was their song, “sending out a shy, tender message”). When together with friends, Paul and Gerry would manage to find “a special grassy spot—a little away from the rest—where we talked, dreamed, created a world of the future where love, romance, happiness would be forever.” He gave her “the football he cherished most and the gold baseball which he prized most among his athletic awards”—the one that recorded the savored victory of the Rutgers baseball team over Princeton (savored because it was the first time in fifty years that Rutgers had defeated Princeton in an athletic contest—and because “Proud Princeton” had turned down his brilliant brother William’s application for admission out-of-hand).27
When Gerry Neale was a young girl, her teacher in the small segregated school she attended in her hometown of Freehold had taught her “pride in African history as well as the history of the Negro in America”—taught her so well that, when she later spoke out time and again in class in Teachers Normal “about the Negro who made this or that contribution,” her white history teacher, “with genuine kindly amusement,” commented, “Miss Neale will make us all regret we are not Negro.” Gerry also insisted, as a young girl, in seating herself on the main floor of the segregated movie theater in Freehold—while her friends went to the balcony as directed. Even so, Gerry felt Paul was ahead of her—and of those few others in their crowd who were concerned with social issues. “His voice got earnest, vigorous (not loud) when speaking about the subject of race discrimination.” She adds that she is not implying that Paul’s ideas at the time were well formed or that he was a “radical activist” in the subsequent sense of that term: his tone was not militant and his tactics were not confrontational. He cared deeply about the plight of black people, yet as a young man “believed fully that the promises of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights could be realized if people worked hard at it,” if they relied on the efficacy of a conciliatory appeal to the nation’s conscience. Some fifteen years later Robeson told an English friend that during his adolescence there was “still no questioning of accepted values,” and during his college years—a “period of comparative harmony”—his “creative impulses [were] driven underground and interest centered in athletics”; he added, significantly, that it was “a period of apparent triumph, yet not really satisfying.”28
Robeson’s confidence in the essential beneficence of the American system, even when he was a young man, had its limits. Passive reliance on the “inevitability” of progress was, he felt, a chimera and a trap; neither time, patience, nor even reliance on the tender mercies of the Divinity could guarantee desirable social change. That would come about only “if people worked hard at it.” When Gerry and her classmate Bessie Moore (Robeson had been close to the Moore family of Princeton since childhood) decided to take some action against segregation in the women’s dormitory at Teachers Normal, Paul joined them for planning sessions, encouraging their purpose. After a “very polite but earnest” letter to the college president, Gerry and Bessie pressed their case in a personal interview with him. The president expressed sympathy. He thought he had “the right answer”: the school owned an unoccupied house whose basement it used for storing coal. It was a lovely house, he said. He would let the female black students use it for their very own dormitory. Gerry expressed “appreciation for the color scheme he had in mind: black coal, black women students,” but said the offer was unacceptable. She and Bessie held out for a change in college policy that would allow any black woman who wanted to live in the regular dormitory to do so. Somewhat to their own surprise, that permission was granted—perhaps in part because it was felt that the black women currently on campus were already settled in private homes and therefore unlikely to avail themselves of the offer. That turned out to be the case; Gerry, who was tempted, couldn’t afford to move. Still, they had worked hard for a victory, and won it. “Paul was pleased.”29
But Gerry and Paul did not see eye to eye on all matters. He was more interested in marriage than she: “I was not sure I loved him enough.” Her friends were astonished—“Who would ever raise such a question if they could marry Paul Robeson?!” She explained that she did not think her feelings were strong enough to survive the difficulties of marriage to a man who “would be called upon around the world to be Everyman.” Gerry, like most middle-class young women of the day, believed that “a good marriage” took precedence over other priorities. Though Paul had been able to persuade her that she was the center of his universe (a charismatic quality that men and women responded to and remarked on all through his life), Gerry was shrewd enough to realize that, as a “man of destiny,” he would in time inevitably move on to someone else. So when Paul did actually propose marriage, Gerry turned him down. He refused, however, to accept her decision and for some time longer would continue to try to change it.30
In June 1919 they both graduated. The undergraduate “class prophecy” for 1919 confirmed Gerry’s instincts by predicting that Paul, by 1940, would be governor of New Jersey, would have “dimmed the fame of Booker T. Washington,” and would be “the leader of the colored race in America.” That summer Gerry enrolled at Rutgers, to study Shakespeare for her own enjoyment and to take craft courses in preparation for teaching mentally retarded boys in Atlantic City that coming fall. Paul moved to Harlem to prepare for his entrance into Columbia University Law School. Reverend Robeson had wanted him to become a minister, and for a time Paul had felt the inclination himself. From boyhood he had actively worked in his father’s church and when Reverend Robeson was indisposed had occasionally deputized for him, “reading and talking a little to keep things going in his absence.” But during college Paul decided that he lacked zeal for the ministry and that a career in law better suited his combined wish to make a name for himself and to serve his people. If Reverend Robeson had been disappointed, he never said so—“He made no attempt to upbraid me, or to persuade me to change my resolution.” The fact that another son, Ben, was due to become a minister had undoubtedly softened his father’s disappointment.31
Paul returned to New Brunswick often that summer to see Gerry, but, as she had sensed, his “destiny” was about to unfold, precipitately, taking him off in a variety of new directions.