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  ...