Dr. Narcisse
Veteran
As a first-year student at Rutgers College during fall 1915, when Paul Robeson was the sole African-American student on campus and only the third to be enrolled in the 149-year-old school, he held a white classmate over his head in rage and thought he wanted to kill him. But he didn’t. After Rutgers’ football head coach George Foster “Sandy” Sanford shouted, “Robey, you’re on the varsity!” Robeson placed his new teammate – the one who’d just stomped on his hand in an attempt to break it – on the ground unharmed.
“He didn’t just accept abuse; he pushed back,” says Wayne Glasker, an associate professor who specializes in African-American and 20th-century U.S. history at Rutgers University-Camden. “And the team realized, ‘OK, he’s a rugged guy, the kind of person we need.’”
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