Responding to backlash from the city's residents, he continued to teach and was one of the Lane Rebels who would not be pressured to give up improving the lives of African Americans.

Marius Racine Robinson, the son of strict Presbyterian parents, was born on July 29, 1806, in Dalton, Massachusetts.

[2] When he was 15, he attended evangelist Charles Grandison Finney's revival and experienced a conversion and felt a religious calling to be of service to others.

He graduated with high honors in 1832, but he did not receive his diploma until he delivered a lecture on a test question, with approval by the North Alabama Presbytery.

[6] While at the University of Nashville, Robinson met Theodore Weld, a liberal theologian and co-founder of the Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio.

[8] After Lane Seminary, Robinson and Augustus Wattles remained in Cincinnati, where he served the local free Black population as a teacher and missionary.

It was essentially a volunteer position in which they immersed themselves in the African American community and worked long hours in Cincinnati's schools.

[10] At the time, many of Cincinnati's residents were anti-abolitionists, and they did not condone efforts to condemn slavery, promote equality, and educate the city's Black people.

Robertson, author of Hearts Beating for Liberty said that "No couple better symbolizes the symmetry and success of men's and women's connections in the western abolitionist movement than Marius and Emily Rakestraw.

[14][15] Although he was taken 10 miles (16 km) out of town, Robinson was able to get a suit of clothes to wear and walked back to Berlin, where he delivered his speech.

Pro-slavery factions were dangerous for outspoken abolitionists, as Robinson noted following the death of Elijah Parish Lovejoy (died November 7, 1837), "I fear we are not yet at the worst in our conflict with slavery.

Blood I fear must yet flow and persecution more bitter and rancorous succeed..."[16] For ten years, he lived on a farm in Putnam, Ohio.

Robinson supported the positions of the eastern radical group of abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Edmund Quincy, and adopted the slogan "No Union with Slaveholders".

His wife Emily, one of the earliest antislavery feminists, became the agent for the paper until 1854, resigning following the death of their daughter Cornelia.

[1][19] He attended and reported on the national disunion convention held in Cleveland on October 28, 1857, which had been called for by Garrison's newspaper The Liberator.

[24] Robinson gave an anti-slavery lecture in New Garden, Ohio, Emily's hometown and her parents warmed up to her new husband after hearing him speak.