Philadelphia’s Paul Robeson House is hosting a weeklong celebration of Robeson’s 125th birthday, culminating with Sweet Honey in the Rock

During school tours at the Paul Robeson House & Museum in West Philadelphia, executive director Janice Sykes-Ross often asks students to name the most famous person they know.

“They may say, Beyoncé, or Barack Obama, or Taylor Swift. Then I tell them that [that kind of fame] was Robeson’s five times over,” she said.

“He took that fame and fortune, and he sacrificed it for liberty. Imagine if Beyoncé all of a sudden said, ’I’m going to travel around the world talking about injustice.’”

Robeson, who was valedictorian of his Rutgers University Class of 1919, was also an exceptional athlete who played both college, as an All-American, and professional football. He later earned a Columbia University law degree.

After he quit his job at a New York law firm because of racism, Robeson, made his mark as a popular bass-baritone concert singer and an actor on Broadway and London stages in The Emperor Jones and Othello. His singing of “Ol’ Man River,” from the musical Show Boat, was a signature song.

However, his outspoken criticism of racism and lynching in the United States, his support for labor rights for Welsh miners and for the Republicans fighting fascist Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War made Robeson a target of the U.S. Senate and House Un-American Activities Committees.

He was accused of being a communist. His passport was revoked and his popularity and career plummeted.

“The artist must take sides,” Robeson said in a radio broadcast in support of democracy in Spain. “He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery.”

This weekend, the Robeson House, at 4951 Walnut St., will kick off an eight-day celebration of Robeson’s 125th birthday. He was born in Princeton on April 9, 1898.

The museum hopes the major celebration will not only honor Robeson, but “heighten the profile of the Robeson House.”

“We knew for the 125th anniversary we needed to be expansive in what we were going to to do,” Sykes-Ross said.

There will be a bus trip Saturday to the Princeton neighborhood and church where his father was a minister, and a trip on Easter Sunday to the Harlem church where Robeson’s brother, Benjamin, was a minister.

There will be other activities throughout the week: an essay contest award ceremony next Tuesday; a street-renaming ceremony, block party and stained-glass door unveiling on Friday morning, April 14; a panel discussion that Friday night, and a gala at the Zellerbach Theater at Penn Live Arts, featuring Gina Belafonte and Sweet Honey in the Rock, on Saturday, April 15.

More details about the weeklong celebration can be seen here.

The museum, which the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance owns and operates, recently was awarded a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, which it is sharing with the Paul Robeson House in Princeton, Sykes-Ross said.

There are plans to introduce more technology at the museum and create a plan for the future. Officials want to eventually combine the museum at 4951 with its twin house at 4949 Walnut St., which serves as administrative offices for the cultural alliance and museum.

The properties are Victorian twins built in 1911. By merging the two houses, the museum wants to create more “flow” and provide a larger gathering space for events and programs, she said.

From the wide front porch at the Robeson House, it is easy to imagine Robeson sitting in a chair beside his sister, waving to neighbors walking by.

Some of those people may have never known of the famous visitors who dropped by to see Robeson.

Among them were actors Ossie Davis and his wife, Ruby Dee, and the singer Harry Belafonte, who in 1998, told an interviewer, he thought of Robeson as a mentor since Belafonte was 20 and starting his career at the American Negro Theater in New York.

Robeson moved into 4951 Walnut St. in 1966 to live with his sister, Marian Forsythe, after Robeson’s wife and manager, Eslanda Goode Robeson, died the year before.

Forsythe, a retired Philadelphia schoolteacher, was also widowed. Her late husband, James Forsythe, had been a Black physician.

The Robeson House is on the National Register of Historic Places and from the Pennsylvania Historic Marker outside, one might assume that Robeson’s major connection to Philadelphia was that he lived there for the last 10 years of his life.

» READ MORE: A newly opened reading room at West Philly’s Paul Robeson House honors Paul’s wife, Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson

But Robeson’s ties to Philadelphia are far deeper than living on Walnut Street until his death in 1976. His Philadelphia connections date back to the Revolutionary War.

His maternal great-great grandfather was Cyrus Bustill, a baker who provided bread for George Washington and his troops at Valley Forge. Bustill was also cofounder of the Free African Society in Philadelphia in 1787.

Robeson’s father, the Rev. William Drew Robeson, fled from enslavement in North Carolina in 1860 at 15 and made his way to Philadelphia. He graduated with a degree in theology from Lincoln University and was pastor of the Witherspoon St. Presbyterian Church in Princeton.

While studying at Lincoln, William Robeson met and married Maria Louisa Bustill, Robeson’s mother, a schoolteacher who was Cyrus Bustill’s great-granddaughter.

The prominent Bustill family also included the abolitionists and women’s rights activists Grace Bustill Douglass and her daughter, Sarah Mapps Douglass, among many other activists and educators.

Robeson also had ties to the Mossell and Henry Ossawa Tanner families through his mother, Maria Louisa Bustill.

Maria Louisa’s sister, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, married Nathan Francis Mossell, the first Black student to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania’s Medical School.

Nathan’s brother, Aaron Albert Mossell, the first Black student to graduate from Penn’s Law School married Mary Louisa Tanner Mossell, who was Henry Ossawa Tanner’s sister.

Aaron and Mary Louisa Mossell were the parents of Philadelphia lawyer and economist Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, who was born in 1898 in Philadelphia — the same year that Paul Robeson was born.

For tickets and more information, visit the Robeson Museum’s website: at https://www.paulrobesonhouse.org/125th-birthday-celebration/