Growing up in Tazewell County, young Warren attended the public school at Graham, Va. After that he spent three years at the Bluefield Colored Institute and then in 1908 finished his course at the Morristown Normal and Industrial School.
After completing his literary work, he took up pharmacy at the Meharry School of Pharmacy of Nashville from which he was graduated in 1911. He must have made an enviable record in that department for when he began his medical course, he was made a teacher in the School of Pharmacy and taught there during the four years of his medical course which he completed with the M.D. degree in 1915.
In working out the expenses of his education, Dr. Warren began on the railroad and later got into hotel work. After beginning his course in pharmacy he was able to secure employment in drug stores during vacations. On completion of his course at Meharry in 1915, he began the practice at Giatto, W. Va., where he remained for 18 months. He then went to the more populous and promising field at Williamson, where he has since resided and where an excellent practice has been built up.
On Christmas Day, 1915, Dr. Warren married Miss Rosa B. Jordan, daughter of Malinda Jordan. She was educated at Bluefield and was engaged in teaching before her marriage. They have three children, Rosalie M., Robt. G., Jr., and Joe W. Warren.
Dr. Warren early in life developed a disposition not to be surpassed by his associates, and a desire to master his situation whatever that might be. He has found inspiration in the lives of men like Booker T. Washington, Roosevelt, and others. He is a student of the literature of the race. In politics he is a Republican and is chairman of the local political organization. He belongs to the A. M. E. church in which he is a trustee. He is a Mason and is identified with State Medical Society and the Flat Top Medical Association.
Dr. Warren has studied conditions as they relate to the race. He is not so much concerned about insisting upon :rights" as he is about seeing the people equipped to exercise and enjoy those rights. He has seen that ignorance, poverty and vice have a tendency to segregate themselves and that no rules about rights and privileges can make them dominant over intelligence, wealth and virtue-that it is character and worth and not color, which should be made the standard.