ABSTRACT
Walter Lenox Roberts Jr. was born on July 24, 1908, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of postal clerk Walter Roberts Sr. (1880-1949) and Mabel Foster Roberts (18821979). He was the fifth of eleven children and a great-grandson of John Telemachus Hilton (1801-1864), a barber who was prominent in the antislavery movement in Massachusetts. The family moved within the city several times before settling by 1930 at 154 Fayerweather Street in the heart of one of Cambridge’s African American neighborhoods.
