Through Daniel Johnson
October 13, 2025
It was closed for repairs.
The Paul Robeson House and Museum has reopened in August 2024 after being closed due to repairs needed to be made to half of the building. The long road to reopening the home that Robeson occupied from 1966 until his death in 1976 was marked by a celebration of the new artist in residence space and a community celebration.
According to The Philadelphia Inquirerthe house is property by the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance and they marked the celebration by making admission to the museum – normally $12 – free to the public. Born in Princeton in 1898, Roberson moved to Philadelphia after his wife Eslanda died in 1966, and he lived with his sister, Marian S. Forsythe, until he died in 1976.
Robeson is revered by many black Americans for the stand he took at the height of his fame as one of the country’s leading Renaissance men, regardless of race, because he refused to renounce his anti-capitalist and socialist views and his associations with black American communists during one of America’s most repressive periods, the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. His dedication to those goals ultimately led to his erasure and literally its cancellation by the US government.
Funding to renovate the house was provided through a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, said Azsherae Gary, the interim director of the Paul Robeson House.
Gary also noted that the money was divided equally between the house in Philadelphia and the Paul Robeson House in Princeton, the house in which his father, William Drew Robeson I, raised him.
As Gary said Researcher“You have to take care of your institutions and manage them well. This is a person who played an important role in American history. He only lived here for a short time, but he had a big impact.”
She continued, noting that Robeson “is relevant today because of what he believed in. He is an American hero with a humanitarian through and through. He cared about social justice. He cared about workers and their rights. He stood up and sacrificed his livelihood because he had a basic moral compass and believed in doing the right thing. We want people to bring people here to learn about the history.”
As for Robeson’s blatant removal from American history, Philadelphia musician Jamaaladeen Tacuma, who once paid tribute to Robeson at the house in 2022, said that when he discovered Robeson’s prodigious achievements as an adult, it upset him that Robeson was blacklisted.
“I was angry because I didn’t know anything about him, because his story was erased and I didn’t learn anything about him in school,” Tacuma said. “I mean, goodness gracious, everything he got his hands on was incredible.”
Robeson has the distinction of being the third black student to attend Rutgers University and the first black football player to be that good. Coach and sportswriter Walter Camp (who has a collegiate player of the year award named after him) called him “the greatest defensive end that ever walked on the playing field.”
Robeson, a fierce anti-fascist, told the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956: “The question is whether American citizens, regardless of their political beliefs or sympathies, can enjoy their constitutional rights. My father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I will stay here and have a part of it, just as you do. And no fascist-minded people will drive me out of it.”
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