Abbot was born on November 24, 1868, in St. Simons, Georgia (although some sources state Savannah, Georgia to freedmanparents, who had been enslaved before the American Civil War. The Sea Islands were a place of the Gullah people, an African-descended ethnic group who continued stronger aspects of African cultures than among African Americans in other areas of the South. His father, Thomas Abbott died when Robert was a baby. His widowed mother Flora Abbott (née Butler) met and married John Sengstacke, an American mixed-raceman of unusual background who had recently come to the US from Germany. His parents were Tama, a freed slave woman of African descent, and her husband Herman Sengstacke, a German sea captain who had a regular route from Hamburg to Savannah. In the Georgia port city in 1847, Herman saw a slave sale. He was so distressed he bought the freedom of Tama, a young woman from West Africa. They married in Charleston, South Carolina, before returning to Georgia, where their interracial marriage was prohibited. Their mixed-race son John was born the next year and a daughter in 1848. Tama died soon after their daughter was born, and Herman took the children back to Germany to be raised by family.
John met the young black widow Flora, who had a year-old son Robert. He cared for Robert as if he were his own. Together the couple had seven children; their family crossed rigid racial boundaries. Robert was given the middle name Sengstacke to mark his belonging in the family. John Sengstacke had become a Congregationalist missionary as an adult; he wrote, "There is but one church, and all who are born of God are members of it. God made a church, man made denominations. God gave us a Holy Bible, disputing men made different kinds of disciples." Sengstacke became a teacher, determined to improve the education of black children. He also became a publisher, founding the Woodville Times, based in what was then a town named Woodville; it was later annexed by the city of Savannah, Georgia. Given the industrialization under way in the country, from 1892 to 1896, Abbott studied the printing trade at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), a historically black college in Virginia. At Hampton, he sang with the Hampton Choir and Quartet, which toured nationally.[5] He earned a law deree from Kent College of Law, Chicago, in 1898.
