Today in New Jersey history:
April 9, 1898: Paul Robeson, Rutgers’ first all-America football player, as well as class valedictorian, Phi Beta Kappa scholar, Columbia law school graduate and subsequently famous actor, singer and political activist, was born in Princeton. Robeson’s career was virtually destroyed in his later years by his defense of the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin, even after other American leftists abandoned those causes, and he died in near poverty in Philadelphia in 1976.
