Biography

Paul Leroy Robeson Jr. (November 2, 1927 – April 26, 2014) was an American author, archivist and historian. Robeson was born in Brooklyn to lawyer, actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson and chemist, author and activist Eslanda Goode Robeson. As his family moved to Europe, he grew up in England (visiting the St Mary's Town and Country School in London) and Moscow, in the Soviet Union. In Moscow, he attended an elite school. The Robesons returned to the United States in 1939 to live first in Harlem, New York, and after 1941 in Enfield, Connecticut. Robeson graduated from Enfield High School and attended Cornell University, where he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering in 1949.

Robeson's paternal grandfather Reverend William Drew Robeson was born into slavery, escaped from a plantation in his teens and eventually became the minister of Princeton's Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church in 1881. Robeson's paternal grandmother, Maria Louisa Bustill was from a prominent Quaker family of mixed ancestry: African, Anglo-American, and Lenape.Robeson worked on the legacy of his father, published a two-volume biography of him, and created an archive of his father's films, photographs, recordings, letters, and publications. As an advocate for social and racial justice he shared the political views of his father, indicating that "like him, I am a black radical". He was married to Marilyn Greenberg in 1949; the couple had two children, David (died 1998) and Susan, and one grandchild.Robeson died of lymphoma in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 2014.