The Civil War-era house at 110 Witherspoon St. in Princeton exudes a 1970s vibe these days, with its aluminum siding and three glass rectangles arranged like steps on the front door. But now there are plans to unmask and restore the historical gem behind the façade in tribute to the man born there in 1898 and whose legacy similarly has been obscured by time.

The house, owned by the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church, is the birthplace of Paul Robeson, the world-renowned concert singer, Broadway and Hollywood star, college football hero, scholar and political activist who was as famous in his heyday as Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan or Martin Luther King Jr. would become in theirs. Mr. Robeson, the son of a runaway slave, had a huge international following and was at the height of his celebrity in the 1930s and 1940s when he risked his career to campaign for an anti-lynching law and civil rights during the years of Jim Crow in segregated America.

Shirley Satterfield, a Quarry Street resident and Historical Society of Princeton
trustee who leads walking tours of historic African-American sites in the Jackson-Witherspoon neighborhood, is part of a committee of church, university and community members working to raise $1 million to restore the house. The goal is to turn the 3,219-square-foot structure, which has had at least five additions made to it over the centuries, into a vibrant community center with a Robeson exhibit and space to house visiting
scholars and families in transition.

Leading a visitor on a tour of the house, Ms. Satterfield fondly recalls the famous bass-baritone’s visits to Princeton in the early 1940s.

“My grandmother actually taught Paul Robeson at the Witherspoon Street School for Colored Children,” Ms. Satterfield says. “And when he came back to Princeton to visit his relatives and sometimes sing at McCarter Theatre, he would come and visit my grandmother. I was just a little tot, but I remember him sitting me on his lap and telling me stories... I remember that deep voice.”

Mr. Robeson’s roots in Princeton ran deep, she says, but he was “soured” by the way his family was treated here.

“He called it the most southern northern town in the United States and it was,” Ms. Satterfield says as she flips through a photo scrapbook of the segregated Jackson Witherspoon neighborhood where blacks lived, shopped and attended elementary school.

Churches too were segregated and there were three black churches at that time in Princeton. Paul Robeson’s father, the Rev. William D. Robeson, was the minister of the largest, the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church, for more than 20 years, until he was forced out by the white Presbytery of New Brunswick in 1901, three years after Paul was born in the church parsonage.

“I think one of the reasons he was dismissed from our church is that he spent a lot of time fighting against Jim Crowism and the white Presbytery was just not ready for that,” Ms. Satterfield says.

Paul Robeson’s childhood in Princeton planted the seeds of social activism that became his focus as an adult. However, his increasingly left-leaning politics and his public admiration for the communist system, which he viewed as less racist, made him a target of the FBI and Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

He was blacklisted by record companies, driven off the airwaves and blocked from performing. Barely able to earn a living and kept under surveillance by the FBI, he retired from public life and died in 1976.

His sister’s Philadelphia house at 4951 Walnut St., where he spent the last 10 years of his life, was purchased in 1994 by the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance and is now a designated national historic site. As part of a fundraising project for restoration work at the house, a new book, Stories from the Paul Robeson House: Lives Touched by a Renaissance Man, has been published and includes the Robeson recollections of dozens of people, including Ms. Satterfield.

Is there enough support for a second Paul Robeson House? Ms. Satterfield says that preserving 110 Witherspoon St. should be as important to Princeton as the Walnut Street house is to Philadelphia.

“I call it the alpha and the omega,” she says. “Here (Princeton) is the alpha, and where he died is the omega. In Philadelphia they are well established, and here we’ve got a lot of work still to do, but we’re getting there.”