Paul Robeson, the singer, actor, athlete, and civil rights activist, was born in 1898 in this house at 110 Witherspoon Street, then serving as the manse for Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church, where his father, the Reverend William Drew Robeson, a man who had escaped slavery in North Carolina as a teenager, served as pastor. The house sits in the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood, the oldest continuously occupied African American community in New Jersey, dating to before the Revolutionary War. Robeson went on to become valedictorian and an All-American athlete at Rutgers, an internationally celebrated performer, and a prominent target of Cold War-era political persecution for his civil rights and labor activism. The house is being restored as a community and cultural center.