Hrabowski was born in segregated
Birmingham, Alabama, the only child of his parents, both of whom were educators. His mother was an English teacher who became a math teacher, and his father was a math teacher who went to work at a steel mill. Frequently asked about the origin of his unusual surname, Hrabowski explains that he is the great-great-grandson of Eaton Hrabowski, who was enslaved and renamed for Polish-American slave owner Samuel Hrabowski. In a
CBS television interview, Hrabowski recounted that he is the third Freeman Hrabowski; his grandfather was the first Freeman Hrabowski born a free man, as opposed to having to be freed. When he was 12 years old, in 1963, Hrabowski saw his friends readying for the
Children's Crusade march for
civil rights. He convinced his parents to let him join in as a youth advocate, but soon into the march he was swept up in a mass arrest. Birmingham's notorious Public Safety Commissioner
Eugene "Bull" Connor spat in his face and arrested him. When he was 19 years old, Hrabowski graduated from
Hampton Institute with high honors in mathematics. During his matriculation there he spent a year abroad at
The American University in Cairo in Cairo, Egypt. At the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he received his MA in mathematics and four years later his PhD in higher education administration and statistics. ==Career at UMBC==