In the autumn of 1915, a 17-year-old Paul Robeson walked onto a Rutgers football tryout as the only Black student on campus and endured a coordinated assault from his own teammates that broke his nose and dislocated his shoulder. He stayed on the field, made the team, and went on to become a two-time consensus All-American whom Walter Camp called the greatest end to ever play. This episode traces Robeson’s chronological life from his 1898 birth in Princeton, New Jersey, to a father who escaped slavery and was later forced out of his ministry, through Phi Beta Kappa, Cap and Skull, a valedictorian speech, and a Columbia law degree funded by weekend games in the early NFL.

When the segregated legal profession shut him out, his wife Eslanda, a histological chemist, quit her hospital job to become his agent and steered him toward the stage. We follow his rise through Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings and The Emperor Jones, his history-making Othello in London, and the way Jerome Kern engineered Ol’ Man River for his bass-baritone voice, a song Robeson later rewrote into a battle cry. The Spanish Civil War transformed him into an activist, and his support for labor unions and the Soviet Union put him on a collision course with McCarthy-era America: a subversive-organizations list, a Senate subpoena, a revoked passport, FBI pressure on venues, and a Supreme Court fight that restored his travel rights in 1958. We close on his refusal to renounce his past, his health collapse, his seclusion after Essie’s death, and the posthumous honors that finally recognized him.

• Surviving the brutal 1915 Rutgers tryout and dominating both athletics and academics
• How Eslanda Robeson analyzed her husband’s talents and relaunched him as a performer
• Ol’ Man River, Showboat, and the physics of a bass-baritone voice
• The 1937 Spanish Civil War awakening and the belief that artists must take sides
• Passport revocation, FBI pressure, and the cost of refusing to denounce his principles