Long before Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball, early African American male scholar-athletes graced many of the elite institutions as both scholars and athletes. Some of the names include William Henry Lewis (Amherst, Harvard), Jerome “Brud” Holland (Cornell), Ralph Bunche (UCLA), Charles Drew (Amherst) and the one and only Paul Robeson of Rutgers University. Before Robeson went on to achieve Phi Beta Kappa, All-American athlete and elite academic, athletic and social honors—barriers stood in his path. Robeson was experiencing his reality colliding with racist ideology. His teammates resisted his presence with overt acts of violence and inhumanity, but he survived. The support of his brother and his father’s famous quote gave him the strength, courage and perseverance to succeed despite the “player hating” literally occurring. Paul internalized his father’s words immediately following his first practice. “It was tough going for a seventeen year old and I didn’t know whether I could take any more. But my father had impressed upon me that when I was on a football field, or in a classroom, or anywhere else, I was not there just on my own. I was the representative of a lot of Negro boys who wanted to play football and wanted to go to college, and as a representative, I had to show I could take whatever was handed out…our father wouldn’t like to think our family had a quitter in it.”