Her parents were Charles Hicks Bustill and Emily Robinson, prominent black Quakers.

[6] Louisa Bustill met William Drew Robeson I (1845-1918) when he was a student at Lincoln University.

Louisa taught school and worked as a tutor while her husband was the Presbyterian minister of the Witherspoon Church in Princeton, New Jersey.

It was an upwardly mobile family;[1] all but one of their sons were highly successful as adults, with two having professional careers: Dr. William Drew Robeson, Jr., M.D.

(1881-1925) was a physician in Washington, DC; Marian M. Robeson (1894-1977) married Dr. William Forsythe, M.D.

and they moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Benjamin C. Robeson (1893-1963), was a minister at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Harlem, New York City; John Bunyan Reeve Robeson (1886-1973) aka Reed Robeson, moved to Detroit, where he worked as a laborer and may have worked at a hotel, then again moved to Sioux City, Iowa where he died in poverty.