ldhood full of tragedy. Paul's mother was burned to death when he was six. Then William lost his position at the church. As Paul said, "Poverty was my beginning." William had to take a job at a grocery store, and Paul, with his younger siblings, was sent to live with other family members.
Still, poverty-ridden or not, Paul had instilled in him the three values which would hold him in good stead throughout his life---home, religion, and personal integrity:
Robeson's roots were established in a religion that reveals African influences through musical creativity that allows virtually no break between the sacred and the secular. . . . The role of the Negro home in that process deserves attention. . . . Throughout his youth, Robeson's father insisted on "personal integrity," which included the idea of "maximum human fulfillment." These values were related to an ethical system that favored what Robeson would come to see as socialist rather than capitalist values.
The home was the root of all of Paul's later convictions and talents. He was a musical man from a home which was "theatre and concert-hall and social center," where "there was a warmth of song." He was an educated man from a family whose father and mother cherished schooling, not mainly as a means to an economic end, but as a means to personal fulfillment. He was a Christian man from a minister's family, but he was also drawn to Marxism because it seemed to him to ensure the "personal integrity" of human beings in a more just way than did capitalism. He was an independent man, taught to think for himself, so that his being could accept and solve the contradictions of such disparate visions as Christianity and Marxism.
What Paul learned first and foremost from his upbringing, and especially from his father, was that he was the equal of any man, white or black. As Paul himself declared:
I marvel that there is no hint of servility in my father's makeup. Just as ...