However, Princeton was almost as rigidly segregated as the southern towns were. The one person who moved freely between the Blacks and whites was the Black preacher. And during my youth the person who was the shaky bridge between the two races was my father, Reverend William Drew Robeson.

My father was a dark-skinned man of average height with broad shoulders and classic African features. He was born in 1845 to Benjamin and Sabra on the Robeson plantation near Raleigh, North Carolina. On the eve of the Civil War, when he was just 15 years old, he escaped on the Underground Railroad, making his way over the Maryland border to Pennsylvania.

He served as a laborer in the Union Army and made his way back to North Carolina at least twice to see his mother and father.